Adding two marketplaces without adding a second team

The brand held a strong position in its US subcategory and had run out of obvious growth there — share gains were getting expensive and the category itself was flat. International had been discussed for two years and always stalled on the same assumption: that a new marketplace means a new team, new listings and a new ad strategy built from scratch.

The real blockers were narrower. Nobody had decided which SKUs travel (bulk and voltage rule out several), nobody had checked whether the UK's search language matches the US copy (it doesn't — the terms differ, and translating US copy word for word ranks for nothing), and nobody had modeled the fee and VAT difference per unit.

We treated each marketplace as a ranking launch with a known playbook, not as a new company.

• SKU triage first — every ASIN scored on shipping cost, compliance and local demand; fourteen of forty traveled, the rest stayed home.
• Local keyword research, not translation — UK copy rebuilt on UK search terms, which differ from the US set far more than the shared language suggests.
• Launch sequence, not simultaneous — Canada first as the cheaper rehearsal, UK second with the lessons applied.
• One team, phased attention — each launch got a concentrated eight-week push rather than permanent parallel management.

Total monthly revenue grew from $402k to $515k, with 22% now coming from Canada and the UK — markets the brand had no presence in a year earlier.

The SKU triage is what kept it profitable: shipping only the fourteen ASINs that travel well meant international margin landed within two points of domestic, instead of the negative unit economics the brand had feared. Both launches reached page one on their hero term — Canada in 11 weeks, the UK in 17 — using the same catalog and the same team.