Dick
Mooijman

Every year, ambitious American consumer brands arrive in Europe with a great product, a proven playbook, and genuine confidence. And every year, a significant number of them underperform, miss their targets, and quietly conclude that Europe is harder than expected.

It usually isn't the product. And it usually isn't the market.

It's the playbook.

What works in the United States, one retail strategy, one GTM motion, one org structure, one set of messaging, rarely travels intact across 25 markets that differ in language, retail landscape, consumer behavior, regulatory environment, and cultural expectation. Europe is not a market. It's a collection of markets that requires a fundamentally different operating logic.

The brands that win in Europe share a few things in common. They treat EMEA as a strategic capability, not a sales region. They invest in local leadership with real authority, not just execution mandates. They build operating rhythms that allow HQ and the region to stay genuinely aligned, without the region becoming a slow-moving outpost waiting for decisions to travel from Santa Barbara or New York.

The translation problem runs in both directions. European teams often struggle to make themselves legible to US leadership: the context gets lost, the numbers land without narrative, and trust erodes on both sides. I've spent the better part of my career sitting in that gap, helping US companies understand what their European business is actually telling them, and helping European teams move faster because HQ finally understands what they need.

Getting this right is not complicated. But it requires someone who has genuinely lived on both sides of it, and who knows what good looks like.

For most of the last decade, the direct-to-consumer shift was framed as a reckoning. Brands that were serious about growth would move online, own the customer relationship, and gradually reduce their dependence on retail partners. Retail was the past. DTC was the future.

The brands that took that framing literally paid for it.

The ones that came out strongest treated DTC and retail not as competing channels but as complementary ones, each doing a different job in the customer journey. DTC gives you margin, data, and a direct relationship with the customer. Retail gives you discovery, physical presence, and the kind of trust that comes from being in the right store next to the right brands. When the channel logic is right, they reinforce each other. When it isn't, they cannibalize each other and the brand ends up serving neither well.

At Sonos, we made DTC the primary growth engine across 25 European markets without breaking our retail relationships. That required being genuinely honest about what each channel was for, resetting partner terms in a way that was commercially fair, and building operating discipline that kept supply, pricing, and brand presentation consistent across every touchpoint.

The shift wasn't painless. But it was deliberate. And the result was higher gross margin, healthier sell-through, and retail partners who remained genuinely invested in the brand because we had treated the relationship with care.

The lesson isn't that DTC always wins. It's that the brands with the clearest channel logic, and the discipline to execute it consistently, tend to win regardless of where the customer ultimately buys.

Building a high-performing European team is not the same as building a high-performing team that happens to be in Europe.

The distinction matters more than most US leadership teams realize when they make their first senior European hire, or restructure their regional org, or try to understand why performance varies so dramatically from one market to the next.

Good European leadership requires holding a specific kind of tension. On one side, genuine respect for local market nuance: the way German consumers make purchasing decisions is not the same as the way French or Dutch or British consumers do, and a leader who flattens that complexity in the name of operational efficiency will lose the markets that require the most care. On the other side, clear alignment with global brand and commercial strategy, so that local adaptation doesn't become local fragmentation.

The leaders who navigate that tension well share a few qualities. They build trust quickly across cultures, without losing their own point of view. They create operating rhythms that give country teams clarity and autonomy without disconnecting them from the broader business. And they maintain a strong, honest line of communication with HQ, so that the regional picture stays legible to the people making global decisions.

The org design matters too. European businesses that perform tend to have country leaders with real scope and real accountability, supported by a regional layer that sets strategy, guardrails, and shared capabilities, rather than managing every decision from the center.

I've built and led teams this way across 25 countries. The thing I've learned is that the culture you build at the regional level, the norms, the operating cadence, the way people debate and decide and commit, travels further and faster than any strategy document. Get that right and execution follows. Get it wrong and even the best strategy stalls somewhere between Amsterdam and Milan.