35% More — Without Changing the Product
The brand
Sportamore is a Scandinavian sports and outdoor retailer with over 20,000 products across running, cycling, fitness, outdoor and more. With operations across Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, the business was built around a centralised trade marketing model — one calendar, one strategy, applied across all markets.
The situation
When I joined as the Danish market lead, sportamore.dk was the smallest and weakest performing of the four markets. Revenue growth and conversion were both lagging — not because the product range was wrong, but because the approach wasn’t built for Denmark.
The central trade marketing calendar was dominated by Swedish priorities: ski, skating and alpine sports. Campaigns, featured brands and promotional focus were designed for the Swedish consumer and applied uniformly across all markets. Denmark was getting a strategy that wasn’t built for it.
The commercial discipline
Sportamore was a data-driven operation, and the daily commercial routine reflected that. Every morning started with the sales report — tracking units on hand, units sold last week and the week before, revenue in DKK, gross margin for the week and year-to-date, and two critical inventory metrics: DIO (Days Inventory Outstanding) and Annual Turnover Rate.
These weren’t vanity metrics. They drove daily decisions: which products to push, which campaigns to pull forward, where margin was being left on the table and which inventory needed to move. Running a catalogue of 20,000+ SKUs requires this kind of discipline — and it shaped how I thought about commercial ecommerce from the ground up.
Price competitiveness was equally systematic. The top 100 products in each category were checked daily against competitors via prisjakt and pricerunner, with price match actions taken where needed. Campaign monitoring ensured we never let a competitor’s promotion go unanswered.
What I did
Market-specific merchandising The first and most impactful change was reorienting the Danish site around what Danish consumers actually searched for and bought. The Swedish-led focus on ski, alpine and skating gave way to the categories that drove Danish demand: football, running, training, handball, outdoor and sportswear.
This wasn’t a product or range decision — it was a merchandising and prioritisation decision. Changing what was featured, visible and promoted on sportamore.dk without changing the underlying catalogue.
A Danish commercial calendar I built a separate commercial calendar for the Danish market, designed around Danish seasonality, sports events, holidays and consumer habits rather than the centralised Scandinavian template. This shaped both site merchandising and the email marketing programme — ensuring what we communicated was relevant to Danish customers at the right moment.
Email marketing aligned to local demand Newsletter planning and execution were rebuilt around the Danish calendar and category priorities. Content, timing and featured products were chosen for relevance to the Danish audience rather than adapted from Swedish output.
Market-specific landing pages and shop-in-shops I created and maintained Danish-specific landing pages and shop-in-shops built around local sports events, cultural moments and seasonal demand — giving Danish customers a site experience that felt local, not like a translated version of something else.
MobilePay integration I initiated and drove the internal project to integrate MobilePay as a payment method on sportamore.dk — a significant step for conversion on the Danish market where MobilePay is the dominant payment preference.
The result
Revenue on sportamore.dk grew YoY by 35%.
Conversion rate improved by 25%.
Both numbers came from the same insight: a generic Scandinavian strategy wasn’t working for a Danish audience. Local demand, local seasonality and local payment preferences deserved a local approach — and when they got one, the market responded.
What made it possible wasn’t a bigger budget or a bigger team. It was daily commercial discipline, a clear view of the numbers and a willingness to build something different for a market that needed it.