A Shopify localisation build for a European supplements brand’s South African launch – adapting an EU store for the local market, opening with a gated pre-order phase for Pro Circle members.
Vast Sports, a premium supplements brand, was bringing its European store to South Africa – but the existing Shopify setup was built for an EU audience: EU fonts, EU tone, EU logistics assumptions, and no way to sell locally without leaking search visibility back to the parent site.
Rather than a ground-up build, Vast Sports needed a careful localisation: keep the visual DNA of the European brand, but adapt the tone, positioning and mechanics for a South African “Pro Mindset” audience – and launch with a private pre-order phase for its Pro Circle subscribers before opening the store to the public.
We refined and localised the existing EU Dawn-theme store rather than rebuilding from scratch, starting with a theme and app audit to establish what could be kept, what needed adapting and what had to go.
The homepage was redesigned around a softer, persona-driven aesthetic with South African imagery and an Instagram feed. The About page was rebuilt around a new local narrative – “From Alpine Precision to Mzansi Grit” – speaking to the full range of Vast Sports’ Pro Mindset personas, from weightlifters and endurance athletes to cyclists, yogis and golfers.
Premium EU fonts were swapped for close, lower-cost local alternatives, and product copy was localised from the original German-to-English translations for the South African market.
The launch opened with private, gated access for Pro Circle subscribers – customers completed a qualifying questionnaire before they could purchase, with a live payment portal for pre-order stock allocation. Once the pre-order phase closed, the gate came down and the store opened to the public.
Klaviyo was connected and existing subscriber data mapped in, Review.me was configured with the brand’s existing reviews imported, and Stitch and Yoco were set up as local payment gateways. On the technical side, we ran a full SEO and redirect audit so the South African store indexes locally with zero leakage back to the European property, and migrated the brand’s legal and policy pages across.
