Canary’s co-founders knew their idea had global potential, but confirmation came sooner than imagined. Within one month of introducing their home security system on Indiegogo, 10,000 devices were pre-sold to crowdfunding supporters in 78 countries.
That already impressive international presence has nearly doubled since. Today, Canary retails in 15 countries and serves customers in more than 145 countries. But when Carmen Magar initially joined the team as Director of International, the company was only just preparing its plans for retail penetration and global expansion.
Confirming A Candidate
The team understood that its disruptive success was the result of a superior customer experience. The sophistication of HD video and environmental sensors had never been so accessible in the simplicity of a smartphone interface. But to maintain business momentum, Canary’s content strategy would have to remain as elegant as its engineering approach.
The fact that Canary is easy-to-use and gives people access to the information they need is an important point of differentiation for us — not just from traditional security solutions, but regular IP cameras as well. Communicating with customers in their preferred language is a major prerequisite.
Providing Canary users with a completely native experience would require translating everything from feature descriptions and legal disclaimers to mobile app interfaces and customer support portals. Magar would also have to manage collaboration carefully between departments to ensure localization activities did not distract from product development efforts.
From an operational perspective, colleagues insisted on a solution that would significantly accelerate translation workflows and satisfy aggressive launch deadlines. Translation quality would also have to remain high — especially in an industry defined by authority and trust.
Executing The Plan
Smartling quickly acclimated to Canary’s agile work environment. A dedicated onboarding team assured a fast and thorough implementation, and the home security innovator was able to launch its complete customer experience for French and German users in a matter of weeks.
In addition to helping Canary confidently meet launch deadlines, Smartling also became an ally in the arenas of cost efficiency and quality assurance. Providing translators and reviewers with visual context of the source text proactively reduced the potential for costly linguistic errors. And by leveraging translation memory, Magar consistently reduced translation expenses while preserving brand consistency.
Lastly, this restyled localization process won praise from an IT team formerly concerned that tedious translation tasks might take developers away from mission-critical projects. With Smartling, Canary has ramped up internationalization efforts while continuing to release product updates every 2-4 weeks unimpeded.
We believe we’re only at the beginning of our story, in terms of both international expansion and product innovation in general. We’re happy to have a partner like Smartling that is capable of not only keeping pace, but actually accelerating our global outreach.
Even after successfully launching retail operations in 15 countries over 15 months, though, Canary still sees plenty of opportunity on the horizon. Fresh product features, enhanced app experiences, and more international markets are already on the agenda.
