Building the catalog and market strategy behind a premium hat brand's DTC growth

Challenge

Cayambe Hutmanufaktur is a Berlin-based D2C and retail apparel brand specializing in premium hats, combining Ecuadorian-sourced materials with European craftsmanship. With a growing international presence, the brand's Shopify catalog and go-to-market strategy needed to scale alongside it.

That meant solving two problems at once. The catalog itself needed structure: multilingual EN/DE product content, standardized attributes, and a repeatable process for adding new products, instead of one-off listings built from scratch each time. And the brand needed to actually understand its market: who buys premium hats across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and what the category's strongest players were already doing right.

Approach

The work split into three connected pieces, catalog infrastructure, content production, and market research, each one feeding the others.

• Catalog & operations: created 20+ new product detail pages (PDPs), standardizing and localizing product attributes for a multilingual EN/DE store.
• Shopify workflows: defined the data structures, import templates, and quality control processes behind the catalog, so new products could be added consistently rather than rebuilt from scratch each time.
• Content production: led creative production from concept to execution, product photography, editing, visual direction, and lifestyle photoshoots with external creatives.
• AI-powered creative workflow: connected Photoroom, an AI photo-editing tool, directly to Shopify's API, scaling product photo production and cutting the time from shoot to live listing.
• Market research: sized the DACH headwear opportunity across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, benchmarked a category leader (Stetson) for digital best practices, and built five buyer personas, from quality-driven local urbanites to tourists and heritage-fashion enthusiasts, each mapped to its own channel and campaign approach.
• Instagram content: split the content strategy into two lanes, UGC for authenticity and visual inspiration, and product promotion focused on materials, shapes, and fit.

Impact

The catalog work added 20+ fully localized product pages, backed by a repeatable process, so growing the catalog no longer means starting from zero each time. Connecting Photoroom's AI editing to Shopify's API cut the time from product shoot to live listing, so the catalog could keep scaling without a proportional increase in editing work. The market research turned a general sense of "the DACH market" into five specific buyer personas, each with its own channel and campaign direction, giving the brand an evidence-based plan for where to invest next. Revenue is up 12% since joining, with the operational and strategic groundwork now in place to keep scaling.