🎯 The Challenge
StyleVault, a UK-based fashion e-commerce brand, had identified Germany, the UAE, and Singapore as potential new markets. Their traditional approach—commissioning independent research firms in each country—cost upward of £60,000 and took three months per market. By the time reports landed, trend data was already stale. The team needed a way to validate demand, understand local competitors, and identify the right price points across all three markets simultaneously, without blowing their entire expansion budget on research alone.
🔬 The Solution
StyleVault's Head of Growth signed up for Softstack Research and ran a three-market sizing study within a single afternoon. The platform's AI synthesised publicly available consumer sentiment, search-trend data, competitor SKU pricing, and social listening signals for each geography simultaneously. The team generated 14 custom survey questions in the platform's survey builder, deployed them to local respondents in Germany, the UAE, and Singapore, and had cited, confidence-scored results within 11 days. The AI flagged that premium athleisure—specifically women's sustainable activewear—was the highest-opportunity entry category in all three markets, a cross-market insight they would never have found by running siloed regional studies.
"We used to dread the research phase—it was slow, expensive, and the outputs felt generic. Softstack gave us sharp, cited data we could actually defend to the board. We moved from 'we think there's an opportunity' to 'here's the data, let's go' in under two weeks."
📈 The Results
Armed with granular, AI-verified demand data, StyleVault launched localised storefronts in all three markets within six months—well ahead of their original 18-month roadmap. Year-one cross-border revenue came in 43 % above their pre-launch forecast. Research spend dropped from £60,000+ per market to under £4,000 total across all three markets. The team reallocated the saved budget directly to paid acquisition, which management cited as the second-biggest driver of over-performance.
Key outcomes
- 89 % — Research time saved
- +43 % — Year-1 cross-border revenue lift
- 3 — Markets entered