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the starting point

Global competition in connected watches gets fiercer every year, so positioning was everything. How do you find buyers for smartwatches when giants own the category? And how do you build a brand for customers you can't even talk to in their own language?

The market itself was the first strategic decision. Norway wasn't random: very few Norwegians have a shopping mall within 30 minutes of home, so most buying happens online, Norwegian online shoppers spend roughly €2,470 a year on average, among the highest in the world, with near-total internet penetration. Purchasing power per capita is among the world's strongest, the Norwegian krone was weak against the euro at the time, and after a full market analysis, I found no properly Norwegian smartwatch brand. A gap.

The language barrier turned out to be smaller than feared: Norwegian consumers are factual. Unlike French brands that lean on wordplay and humor, literal machine translations were enough to carry the message.

what actually moved the needle?

Product-market fit didn't come from one product, it came from three distinct audiences, each validated separately. Indestructible watches for adventurers and DIY-ers ('finally a watch that survives everything'). Kids' watches for parents who want a simple way to stay in touch with their children. And watches with built-in earbuds for young, sporty buyers who want to run without their phone.

The earbud watches brought genuine innovation to the market, the wow effect did real work. Adding Klarna (pay-in-installments) removed the last friction on a high-ticket impulse buy. And for the kids' line, simply testing image ads was enough to expose real, unserved demand.

the marketing strategy

The method was deliberately simple: validate each product-market fit with image ads that speak directly to one audience and one problem, backed by short videos showing the product in action. No overproduction, just message-market match.

I adapted the payment stack to the market (Klarna installments), launched on a small Meta Ads budget, and read the signals fast. The media buying was aggressive by design: the moment performance showed up, I doubled the budget, then multiplied it by 10 to ride the wave while it lasted.