Hi, I'm Cemre

I grew up in Istanbul, studied at Koc University, and somehow ended up spending the next decade bouncing between countries. Germany first, then the UK, Romania, Czechia, Turkey again, and eventually the UAE. Six years at BAT, which is the kind of Fortune 500 company where you learn how big organizations actually work: regulated markets, brand stewardship, commercial discipline, and the patience required to get anything approved.

Then I did the opposite. I joined fast-growing ecommerce companies in the Middle East, where there was no playbook, no established process, and most of the time no clear answer to "whose job is this?" At GMG, I led retail expansion and B2B sales for their wellness brand across the Gulf. At Desertcart, I inherited a team with a gap between ambition and execution, took ownership of a P&L spanning 60+ markets, and started building the systems we were missing. A B2B division from scratch. Performance marketing at scale. CRM. Team structure. The kind of work where you spend Monday in a board meeting and Tuesday debugging a Shopify integration.

That's where the building started. Not because I set out to become technical, but because I kept running into problems where the fastest solution was to build something myself. Our customer support team needed better tools, so I built an AI assistant with Claude that connects to 7 different data sources. I wanted a real marketing strategy based on actual data, not vibes, so I built an engine that pulls from GA4, Klaviyo, Google Ads, and Shopify. Our email templates were broken in half the email clients people use, so I wrote them from raw HTML and discovered that Outlook renders emails using Microsoft Word's engine. (Yes, really.)

I've now built over a dozen production tools. Not prototypes or weekend experiments. Systems that teams use daily: a B2B CRM with dual-database architecture, a product photography pipeline using generative AI, email automation with personalized supplement recommendations based on blood test results, a Shopify product importer that handled hundreds of SKUs across multiple brands. Each one started with a specific operational problem and ended with something that actually runs.

What I've learned from working across FMCG, DTC, marketplaces, and cross-border ecommerce is that most "best practices" are just US/UK defaults applied globally. They don't survive first contact with a market where "yes" means "I'll think about it," where trust is built over dinner instead of a pitch deck, or where your logistics partner doesn't pick up the phone on Fridays. Every market has its own operating system, and the skill is recognizing which one you're in.

I'm currently based in Dubai. Still building, still writing, still figuring out what comes next. And perpetually feeling like AI is moving faster than I can keep up with, which is probably the point.