When you are selling ski equipment to Czech locals and tourists whose language you don’t speak, you learn fast that marketing is not about what you say. It is about what they feel.
Before I became CMO of a Canadian MSP consulting firm, before I co-founded One Eleven Creatives with Sarah Newcomb in St. Petersburg, FL, I ran a ski shop in the Czech Republic. I did not speak fluent Czech when I arrived. I did not have a marketing budget. I had a retail space, a product, and the understanding that I had to earn the trust of a community that had no reason to give it to me.
Marketing without a safety net
Running a physical retail business in a country where you are a foreigner removes every assumption you have been quietly making about your customer. You cannot assume shared cultural references. You cannot assume the same emotional triggers work. You cannot assume that what earned trust in one market earns it in another.
What you can do is pay very close attention. I spent the first months of that business listening more than I was talking. Watching how customers interacted with the products. Noticing what questions they asked and which ones they did not ask, but clearly had. Learning what trust actually looked like in that context, which turned out to be very different from what I expected.
That attention became my marketing strategy. Not a campaign. Not a tagline. Just a very precise understanding of what my specific customer needed to feel before they would buy.
Results or noise
The other thing running a physical retail business teaches you is that marketing has to produce results, or it is just noise. There is no vanity metric in a ski shop. Either customers came in and bought equipment, or they didn’t. Either the window display I changed on a Tuesday drove foot traffic that week, or it didn’t. The feedback loop is immediate and unambiguous.
I carried that standard into every marketing role I held after that business. As a CMO, I was never interested in impressions or reach as standalone metrics. I wanted to know what changed. What decision did a potential customer make differently because of this piece of marketing? What revenue can we actually trace back to this campaign?
Most marketing teams are uncomfortable with that question. I find it clarifying.
What it built in me
Running that business gave me a ground-level understanding of what marketing actually is when you strip away the strategy documents, the brand guidelines, and the agency presentations. It is the work of making a specific person feel that a specific thing is right for them. Everything else is infrastructure supporting that.
It also gave me an unusual tolerance for uncertainty. When you are building something in a market you did not grow up in, you get comfortable with not knowing and with moving forward thoughtfully anyway.
What I brought back to One Eleven Creatives
When Sarah and I built One Eleven Creatives, I brought that retail sensibility with me. Our clients are small business owners. They do not have the margin for marketing that looks good but does nothing. They need results they can see.
That is what we build. Not campaigns that impress. Strategies that drive results, and reporting that shows you exactly where the shift was.
Fifteen-plus years of experience later, the core lesson from that ski shop still holds: your customer does not owe you their trust. You earn it by understanding them more precisely than your competitor does.
Veronica Dunn is Co-Founder and CEO of One Eleven Creatives, a woman-owned boutique marketing agency based in St. Petersburg, FL.
Learn more about One Eleven Creatives at 111creatives.com