Vestiaire Collective is an ecommerce website and community dedicated to fashion, where community members can buy and sell gently worn clothes and accessories. Every item is carefully checked by a team of fashionistas before being attractively packaged and shipped to its new owners. Vestiaire uses Gengo’s API to translate descriptions of thousands of new items that are added to the site every week.
Why Gengo?
Christian Jorge, Director of Projects and Co-founder of Vestiaire Collective, is in charge of Vestiaire’s international expansion. He recently shared his reasons for using Gengo:
Vestiaire started as a French site in 2009 but we localized the site into English for the UK in February 2012 and we will soon be launching a US site as well. Thousands of items are added every week, and it is critical that each item’s description is translated for every market in a timely manner. Gengo’s world-beating prices and flexibility through their API seemed to be the only solution for us. Without Gengo we could not have launched the UK website this way. It is easy to localize a website UI, but it didn’t make sense to launch in the UK without having the localized content.
—Christian Jorge, Co-founder
When a seller in France, Vestiaire’s main market, posts an item with a French description, Vestiaire offers a free translation of its product description from French to English. The effect is a product that is more appealing to a global audience which results in sellers having more business opportunities. Because of Gengo’s extremely affordable prices the translation cost is easily justified.
Scaling with translation
Vestiaire is a great example of a company scaling rapidly with translation using the Gengo API. As shown on this graph, the number of translation orders placed has averaged 500 translation jobs per day, and occasionally reaches over 1,000 per day.
For our website localization, we still work with traditional agencies, but for actual content such as product descriptions, Gengo is unbeatable with their API and crowdsourcing principle. The API stability is very good and the overall quality of the translations is great as well.
The traffic of our UK site started to grow very rapidly right after the launch in February 2012. This would not have been possible without having the bulk of content translated on day one. And more importantly, everyday we hear happy voices from our sellers, and we see a growing amount of cross-border transactions between France, the U.K. and the U.S. Integration of Gengo API took 2 to 4 weeks in terms of development time, but that investment has totally paid off.
—Christian Jorge, Co-founder
