A 3-Person Team Launched Le Petit Ballon in 5 New Countries in 2 Months

Le Petit Ballon, a wine subscription brand, migrated to Shopify in October 2024. Thirteen months later, a team of exactly three people — one technical, two marketers — launched five new countries in two months, running four languages including Portuguese.

The problem this solves: expansion usually needs a bigger team

The default assumption for launching five markets is that it requires either a large localisation team or a long timeline, because translation, market-specific storefronts, and lifecycle marketing per region are each normally separate projects. Le Petit Ballon's case study is notable specifically because neither the team size nor the timeline matched that assumption.

What made the 3-person team possible

Two structural changes did most of the work. First, Shopify's Markets and translation tooling handled the market-specific storefront and language complexity natively, rather than requiring bespoke builds per country. Second, the business consolidated three previously separate systems — subscriptions, the online shop, and gifting — onto one unified Shopify instance, so a change made once (a new market, a new promotion, a pricing update) didn't need to be replicated across disconnected tools.

The infrastructure held under real pressure

This wasn't a low-stakes storefront: the case study reports 99.99% uptime overall and 99.99999% availability during Christmas campaigns — the exact moment a subscription-and-gifting business can least afford downtime. Close to half of total ecommerce revenue now flows through Shopify's native checkout.

Leadership also pointed to a specific internal shift: marketers could build and test campaigns directly instead of writing specs and waiting on a development queue, cutting out the handoff chain between product, design, and engineering that had previously slowed execution on every change.

What this means for a brand planning international expansion

The transferable lesson isn't "hire fewer people" — it's that the team-size assumption behind most expansion plans is often a symptom of fragmented tooling, not an inherent requirement of entering new markets. Consolidating the underlying systems first is what makes a lean team sufficient. For the country-by-country mechanics this kind of expansion involves, see our guide to expanding to international markets on Shopify.