Dick
Mooijman

Every year, smart American consumer brands land in Europe with a great product, a proven playbook, and genuine optimism. And every year, a meaningful number of them quietly miss their numbers and conclude that Europe is harder than expected.

It's usually not the product.
It's not the market either.
It's the playbook.

One GTM motion. One retail strategy. One org structure. One set of messages. Applied to 25 markets that differ in language, retail landscape, regulatory environment, consumer behaviour, and cultural expectation in ways that matter enormously for how you sell.

Europe is not a market. It's a collection of markets wearing a single name for the convenience of American balance sheets.

The brands that win here treat EMEA as a strategic capability, not a sales region. They put real leaders in place with real authority, not just execution mandates. They build rhythms that keep HQ and the region genuinely aligned, not just technically connected.

The translation problem also runs the other direction. European teams regularly fail to make themselves legible to US leadership. The numbers land without context. The narrative gets lost. Trust erodes on both sides, and nobody quite knows why.

I've spent 15 years sitting in that gap. It's a solvable problem. But you need someone who's actually lived on both sides of it.

The narrative of the last decade went like this: serious brands go direct. Own the customer. Kill the middleman. Retail is where brands go to get margin squeezed and brand equity diluted.

The brands that took that literally are not doing well.

DTC and retail are not competing channels. They're doing different jobs. DTC gives you margin, data, and a direct relationship with the customer. Retail gives you discovery, physical presence, and the credibility that comes from being next to the right brands in the right stores.

When the channel logic is clear, they reinforce each other. When it isn't, they cannibalise each other and you end up underperforming in both.

At Sonos I made DTC the primary growth engine across 25 European markets without burning the retail relationships that had built the brand. It required being honest about what each channel was actually for, resetting partner economics in a way that was commercially fair, and building the operational discipline to keep pricing, supply, and brand presentation consistent everywhere.

It wasn't painless. But it was deliberate.

The brands that win aren't the ones that picked the right channel. They're the ones that had the clearest logic about why each channel existed, and the discipline to execute that logic consistently.

Most US companies make the same mistake when they hire their first serious European leader. They look for someone who can execute the US model in Europe.

That's not the job.

The job is to hold a specific kind of tension that is genuinely hard to hold. On one side: enough respect for local market nuance that you don't flatten the complexity your country teams are navigating every day. On the other side: enough alignment with the global brand and commercial strategy that local adaptation doesn't drift into local fragmentation.

The leaders who do this well share a few things. They build trust fast across cultures without losing their own point of view. They give country teams real scope and real accountability. And they maintain an honest, direct line to HQ so the regional picture stays readable to the people making global decisions.

The org design matters too. The European businesses I've seen perform have country leaders with genuine authority supported by a regional layer that sets strategy and guardrails, not one that manages every decision from the centre.

I've built and led teams this way across 25 countries over 15 years. The thing that travels furthest isn't the strategy. It's the culture you build at the regional level: how people debate, how they decide, how they commit to something they didn't choose.

Get that right and execution follows. Get it wrong and even the best strategy stalls somewhere between Amsterdam and Milan.