Vestiaire Collective Case Study: Why Lionbridge’s Translation Services were Key to Vestiaire’s International Expansion

Vestiaire Collective is an ecommerce website and community dedicated to fashion, where community members can buy and sell used 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 Lionbridge’s API (formerly Gengo’s API) to translate descriptions of thousands of new items that are added to the site every week.

Why Lionbridge?

Vestiaire Collective’s Co-founder and Director of Projects described their reasons for using Lionbridge and its importance to Vestiaire’s international expansion as follows:

“Vestiaire started as a French site but we have localized the site into English 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. Lionbridge’s world-beating prices and flexibility through their API seemed to be the only solution for us. Without Lionbridge 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.”

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 Lionbridge’s extremely affordable prices the translation cost is easily justified.