Ole Tonsen
Founder & CEO
LinkedIn Profile
Spotlight on
Nolae
Find out how Nolae uses Grapevine Surveys to understand where customers come from across Europe, connect their survey data to Claude, and run smarter localised marketing.
Meet Nolae
Nolae is the home of K-Pop in Europe. Founded to bring the music, merchandise, and collectibles that fans love closer to the people who love them, Nolae sells albums, light sticks, photocards, magazines, and exclusive pre-orders from the biggest names in the genre. Every product is imported directly from Korea and shipped from Germany, so fans across the continent can get hold of the latest releases without the wait, the uncertainty, or the surprise customs bills that so often come with importing from overseas.
That promise has made Nolae one of the most trusted K-Pop retailers in Europe, with a rating of 4.7 across more than fifteen thousand reviews. Fans come for the range and stay for the experience: fast EU shipping, no customs fees, a loyalty programme built around Nolae Coins, and a genuine understanding of a community that cares deeply about getting the details right.
Behind the scenes, Nolae is a serious ecommerce operation. The brand ships across a wide spread of European markets, each with its own language, currency, and marketing landscape. Serving all of them well means understanding each one individually, and that is where structured customer insight becomes essential.
The Challenge
Selling across this many European markets is a real strength, but it also makes understanding performance genuinely complex. Nolae runs localised marketing country by country, which means the team needs to know what is working in each one, not just in aggregate. Where are new customers actually coming from in France compared to Germany? Is spend in one market pulling its weight against the orders it generates?
Collecting attribution data was never the hard part. The hard part was doing something meaningful with it. Analysing responses to the depth the team wanted, market by market, and then lining that up against spend and order data from other sources, was slow and heavily manual. The insight was there in principle, but getting to it took time the team would rather spend acting on it.
What Nolae needed was a way to bring everything together and interrogate it properly, without the manual grind.
The Solution
Nolae implemented a post-purchase survey using Grapevine Surveys, delivered on the Shopify order confirmation page so that every customer is asked how they first heard about the brand at the moment they buy. It is a single, focused attribution survey question, kept deliberately simple, and because it sits on the post-purchase page it captures a high volume of genuine responses without getting in the way of the checkout experience.
We have always been data-led, but for a long time our attribution data lived in one place and everything else lived somewhere else. I wanted one clean question that told us how customers found us, captured reliably on every order, that we could then connect to the rest of our data rather than analyse in isolation. Grapevine gave us exactly that, and it turned out to be the foundation for a much bigger shift in how we work.
"For a business selling across this many countries, being able to ask Claude a question and get a real answer from our own survey data in seconds is genuinely a different way of working. It has changed how we make decisions."
What data are you collecting?
We keep the survey itself as simple as it can be. One attribution question on the post-purchase page, asked on every order, so we build a reliable picture of how customers are finding us. What makes it powerful is not the survey on its own, but everything we can connect it to.
Attribution Response
Every customer tells us how they first heard about Nolae, giving us a customer-reported view of discovery rather than relying on platform data alone.
Country and Market
Every response carries the market it came from, so we can break attribution down country by country instead of treating Europe as one block.
Tied to the Order
Each response is linked to an order, which means it joins cleanly to our Shopify data like average order value and lets us line attribution up against spend for the same market.
What We're Doing With the Data
This is where things really changed for us. Grapevine connects directly to Claude through its AI Connections feature, so our live survey data is available to us in natural language without exporting anything. But we did not stop at survey data. We bring it together with our Shopify order data and our channel spend, including platforms like TikTok, so everything that tells us how a market is performing sits in one place.
That combination is the whole point. On its own, attribution tells us where customers say they came from. Order data tells us what they spent. Spend data tells us what it cost to reach them. Pulling all three into the same view, per country, is what lets us actually understand a market rather than looking at three disconnected reports and trying to hold it all in our heads.
How We Analyse It
With everything connected, we use Claude to generate marketing reports for us on a weekly basis. Rather than manually pulling numbers and building a picture by hand, we have Claude work across the combined data and tell us how each market is performing, where attribution is shifting, and how spend and average order value compare country by country. It runs constantly and consistently, so monitoring performance is no longer a manual monthly scramble, it is just always there.
The value is in what it lets us do next. A recent example: in one market our TikTok reporting was claiming most of the credit for new customers, but our survey data told a different story, with a large share of people saying they had found us another way. At the same time, that market had a stronger average order value than our spend there reflected. Seeing both of those things side by side in the same report, we could model what shifting more budget into that country might do, instead of guessing. That is the kind of decision that used to take days of manual work to even get close to. Now we can explore it in minutes.
Start Collecting Insights with Grapevine Surveys
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