Case study · US Market Entry
Smarkia.
León to Denver.
Smarkia monitors, diagnoses, and optimizes energy across about 6,000 sites. Entering the US meant a site written for an American buyer, on a deadline. Ninth Degree ran positioning, design, and build for one season, inside Smarkia's own brand book and beside Smarkia's own team. Signed May 26, 2026. Live August 10, 2026. 76 days.
ClientSmarkia
SectorAI Energy Management
EngagementFractional CMO & Build
ScopePositioning, Site, Calculator
StatusLive
MonitorDiagnoseAutomate
01
The Starting Point
A company with the proof, and no US front door
Smarkia builds an AI-driven energy management platform. It watches a building's systems in real time, finds the faults, and acts on them, which is why the company calls it True Automation rather than reporting or advice. From León, Spain, the team runs energy for more than 100 clients across about 6,000 sites and 130 million square feet, in real estate, retail, industrial, education, and renewables. Verdantix named Smarkia a Smart Innovator in its 2025 energy management study, which benchmarked 47 platforms. The work carries ISO 27001, ISO 50001, and IPMVP.
None of that was the problem. Smarkia had a brand book, a designer who owned it, a marketing lead, a CIO, and a US business development director already in Colorado. What the company did not have was a season of senior time to point at the United States, or a native read on how an American buyer shops for this. On May 26, 2026, Smarkia signed Ninth Degree for both.
02
The Problem
A good Spanish site is not a US site
Audience
A site built for Spain
The existing site sold to a market that already knew the name. An American buyer meets Smarkia cold, in English, with no local reference points, and decides in about a minute whether this is a serious vendor.
Capacity
A full team, fully booked
Eight people carried the project on Smarkia's side, and every one of them had a day job. A US marketing hire is slow to find, expensive to keep, and permanent against a need that lasts one season.
Vocabulary
The US buyer reads different proof
Spanish energy proof does not travel on its own. A US owner asks about net operating income, square footage, cap rate, and whether anyone is on the ground here. The site had to answer in that vocabulary.
03
The Ninth Degree Process
Position first, build in the open, translate for the buyer
01
Discovery and wireframes
Ninth Degree read the brand book, the sales material, and the founder's own account of the company, then put a homepage wireframe in front of Smarkia three days after signing. The first review round came back with 26 numbered comments. Two more wireframes followed inside a week.
02
Position first
The story got settled before the pages did. Building control, fault detection, and optimization became one promise, True Automation. Five sectors, real estate, retail, industrial, education, and renewables, stand on equal footing, with no lead vertical.
03
Build in the open
Nothing waited for a meeting. Every change went to a live staging URL the same day, so Smarkia reacted to real pages instead of a plan. The record holds two days of 14 commits and one of 17, most of them answering feedback from the day before.
04
Translate for the US buyer
An American owner buys with a spreadsheet. Ninth Degree built a three-lever NOI calculator to the founder's spec, covering energy, operations, and comfort, and set US proof beside it. Copy passes ran with Smarkia's US director in Colorado, and a Denver address went into the footer.
05
Launch
Smarkia's own team and partners took the site into production on their platform on August 10, 2026. Ninth Degree ran a launch review across more than 25 URLs the same day, checking redirects, meta, legal pages, and the calculator math by hand.
04
The Strategy
Smarkia is the hero. We brought the season.
Smarkia did not need a rebrand and did not get one. The 2022 brand book stayed the brief: Klarheit type, the Fluor and Dark Green palette, the pill underline. Every page Ninth Degree drew had to pass that book, and Smarkia's own designer drove the visual notes.
What changed was the reader. The Spanish site sells to a market that knows the company. The US site had to introduce it, prove it, and price it in terms a US owner already uses. So the strategy stayed narrow on purpose: keep Smarkia's brand, keep Smarkia's team, and add the one thing they did not have on staff, a senior operator whose whole job for the season was the American launch.
Smarkia brought the proof. Ninth Degree brought the road map for a market Smarkia had not sold to yet.
Their Team
Our Season
05
The Work
About 25 pages, one calculator, one story
The Homepage
The homepage runs the hero Smarkia's founder approved on July 8, 2026, a rotating headline over a sector picker that sends five readers down five paths. Sections one through five were live on staging 14 days after signing. The whole page was rebuilt around True Automation on July 13, 2026.
The Calculator
Real estate buyers do not buy features, they buy net operating income. The founder wrote the model and Ninth Degree built it: three levers for energy, operations, and comfort, with an optional rent premium. At the reference building, 200,000 square feet at a 7 percent cap rate, the tool returns $1,516,517 in added building value. We checked that number by hand on the live site.
The Sectors
Real estate, retail, industrial, education, and renewables each got a page, and none of them got to be the flagship. Behind them sits a platform hub with five capability pages: connectivity, AI and automation, fault detection and diagnosis, compliance, and cybersecurity. About 25 page routes in all, designed, written, and built in one season.
In the World
Ninth Degree designed and built the complete US site and kept it staged and live to Smarkia throughout. Smarkia's own team and partners carried the site into production on their own platform on August 10, 2026. What sits at smarkia.com today carries the work: the True Automation positioning, the five sectors on equal footing, the page names, and the calculator. The site was built to be owned, not rented.
06
The Outcome
Live in the US, and owned by the people who run it
76 days
signed contract to live production site
14 days
signing to first pages on staging
25 pages
designed, written, and built
5 sectors
one US story
Eleven weeks after signing, Smarkia had a US site, a Denver address in the footer, and a calculator its sellers can open in a meeting. The brand did not change to get there, and the site belongs to Smarkia's team, on Smarkia's platform.
“What I appreciate most is how Ninth Degree hit the ground running, keeping the project moving at the pace we needed.”
You keep the team. We bring the season. You keep what we built.
Entering the US market?
Maybe you have the brand and the team already, and what you are short on is one season of senior time. Tell us what you are launching and we will say whether a season is the right shape for it.
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