Commercial operations leader who builds the AI systems her teams actually use.
I'm Cemre. A decade in commercial operations — brand and market expansion at British American Tobacco, B2B and distribution at GMG, now Head of Marketing and Revenue at a cross-border marketplace across 60+ markets. The last two years I've also been building AI systems on top of that work, mostly to replace the parts of the job that shouldn't need a human.
Work that shipped and mattered.
Four deep dives into how the decisions were made, what failed first, and what the numbers looked like after.
B2B from Zero
5% of customers were driving 30% of revenue — and they were businesses. Built the division, the team, and the CRM to run it from a data observation.
India 10×
1,000 to 10,000 orders a month in four months. Three structural fixes — payment rails, margin model, and a cultural creative insight — not more campaigns.
Category Agent Fleet
One buyer, one merchandiser, one category manager running 4,700 products. Instead of hiring, I designed 11 agents around the team's actual repeatable tasks.
Starting Hewyn
Desertcart lists millions of products. Hewyn lists 4,500 — every one handpicked. Launched March 2026, growing 50–100% month-on-month on organic traffic alone.
AI systems I've built and run.
Built over the last two years to solve specific commercial problems inside Desertcart and Hewyn. All running in production.
Handles tier-1 support queries across 11 markets. Connects to 7 live data sources — order status, inventory, catalog — so agents spend time on escalations, not lookups.
Full email marketing platform with drag-and-drop composer, AI strategy generation, and automatic English-to-Arabic translation with RTL rendering.
84 skills across attribution, pricing, SEO, and customer intelligence, connected to 8 live data sources. Replaced hours of weekly manual reporting for a 4,700-product brand.
Pulls GA4, Google Ads, Shopify, and Klaviyo data and drafts a weekly commercial memo. Read Monday mornings instead of pulling four separate reports.
Lifecycle campaigns triggered from Shopify events — abandoned cart, replenishment, win-back. Runs continuously without weekly campaign planning.
11 agents running daily and weekly across Hewyn's 4,700-product catalog — competitive pricing, stock strategy, PDP quality checks, new product discovery.
7 scanners surface weekly merchandising findings across 78 collections. A Strategist generates proposals; a merchandiser approves or rejects.
Where I've worked.
Three roles across Fortune 500 consumer goods, Gulf distribution, and cross-border ecommerce. Each one taught me a different answer to how commercial teams actually work.
Cross-border ecommerce platform, 60+ markets
P&L responsibility for growth across 60+ countries. Rebuilt the India market from flat to 10×. Built the B2B commercial infrastructure. Shipped the AI agent fleets now in daily use across the business.
Food & beverage distribution, Gulf region
Identified a latent B2B demand signal in the existing customer base. Wrote the business case, hired the team, personally closed the first distribution deals. Built the division to €18M revenue in year two.
Regulated consumer goods, 6 EU markets
Commercial operations across Germany, UK, Romania, Poland, and Czechia. Grew the consumer base 6× in Germany. Ran campaigns in 6 markets simultaneously, reporting to global leadership.
Things I've written down.
On commercial operations, AI in practice, and what actually happens when you try to scale across markets.
Featured in WORLDEF Magazine Mar-Apr 2026 — how Desertcart built cross-border ecommerce trust across 60+ markets, and what we learned moving from translated playbooks to culturally-built campaigns.
Every marketing team uses AI now. But 'I used AI for that' sounds identical whether someone tidied a draft or pressure-tested an entire brief. Most marketing leaders can't tell the difference.
An interview with AdTech Today ME on cross-cultural marketing, AI in advertising, building trust in cross-border commerce, and why I stopped translating campaigns and started building them from cultural truths.
Customers in the Gulf don't pay for products. They pay for certainty. After running cross-border ecommerce across 60+ markets, here's what actually builds trust.
76% of GCC shoppers use COD. It's not about cash. It's about trust. Here's how to optimize checkout for the Gulf region based on what customers actually fear.
You can't optimize your way to a multi-million dollar brand. Performance marketing captures demand. Brand creates it. Here's what happens when you hit the ceiling.
A marketing leader builds a portfolio site using Claude Code, Astro, and zero prior web development experience. What went right, what went wrong, and why the process matters more than the stack.
Germany wants direct challenge in meetings. UAE wants private feedback after. The Netherlands skips the small talk entirely. "Yes" means three different things depending on where you are.
Three months of emails, presentations, and calls got us nowhere. One dinner in Jeddah where we talked about his son's graduation got us a signed contract.
We threw campaigns at it for months. Nothing worked. Then we fixed pricing, payment options, and delivery expectations. 10× in six months. India isn't a marketing problem — it's an operations one.
Most people are here temporarily. There's no generational brand memory. Every interaction has to do more work. In a transient market, trust is built through transactions, not storytelling.
Let's talk about the work.
If you're working on something interesting — a hard operational problem, an AI build, or just want to swap notes — email is the fastest way to reach me.