Meet Kiabi

For nearly five decades, French fashion leader Kiabi has had a clear, unwavering mission: to make life easier for families through accessible, sustainable fashion and a simple, seamless shopping experience.

Founded in 1978 in the small town of Roncq, France, with a name inspired by “qui habille” (“who dresses”), Kiabi has grown into an international fashion powerhouse, generating €2.5 billion in annual revenue and serving more than 24 million customers across 37 sales territories in Europe and beyond.

Today, Kiabi’s vision also embraces environmental responsibility through circular practices, second-hand apparel, and initiatives that help families make more sustainable lifestyle choices.

As Kiabi has expanded across channels, countries and product categories, maintaining that consistent level of convenience and simplicity has become increasingly important.

Its customers’ expectations are straightforward: help them quickly find the right item, whether they are looking for baby clothes, back-to-school basics, seasonal products, second-hand garments, or marketplace offers—at the right price, in the right size, and at the right time.

Delivering that experience at scale requires search and discovery that can consistently provide the speed, relevance and simplicity Kiabi customers expect.

The Challenge: Maintaining Seamless Customer Experiences Across a Growing Marketplace

As an ecommerce pioneer, Kiabi launched its first webstore in 2000. In 2022, it launched an online marketplace in France, which it has quickly expanded to Spain and Italy, increasing its volume, diversity and geographic reach.

As its marketplace expanded across countries and its catalog diversified to include new, pre-owned and third-party products, Kiabi needed search and discovery that could scale to support customer experience excellence.

“The growth of our catalog required strengthening the robustness of our tools and processes — particularly around product data quality, ranking and search — to maintain a high-performing experience regardless of the increase in product volume and diversity,” says Alizée Duriez, Leader E-shop Group at Kiabi.

She adds that to achieve its impressive goals, Kiabi’s sought to integrate its marketplace consistently across countries while handling this extraordinary catalog growth and strengthening search or browsing. Balancing Kiabi and marketplace products in search also became vital as the catalog expanded from approximately 19,000 to 200,000 items.

At the same time, the company wanted a search solution that reduced developer time and resources required to run, especially with such intense demands, allowing it to more cost-effectively scale to meet its omnichannel, international and marketplace ambitions.

The Solution: Building A Scalable Search Foundation with Algolia

The Kiabi team desired a well-recognized, feature-rich solution and comprehensive e-merchandising capabilities to manage search, recommendations and product ranking within the same platform, efficiently across multiple countries and languages. They found this in Algolia.

“After comparing several options, we chose Algolia for its ability to meet the needs of a large organization like Kiabi, while also meeting high standards for performance, security, and scalability,” Alizée says. “The presence of many well-known references among its clients also reinforced our choice.”

Multinational omnichannel adoption

Kiabi deployed Algolia Search across France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands in September 2023, while also using it to support its existing French marketplace. It soon activated Dynamic Re-ranking (DRR) to improve relevance. From there, Kiabi teams refined the search and discovery experience by implementing AI Synonyms and using Analytics to track KPIs, improve data quality and enhance search performance.

Because Kiabi shares a similar catalog across regions, the initial technical rollout across its European sites was relatively easy, Alizée explains. Language, she adds, was crucial to success: “The real challenge is mostly language. It’s clearly the main daily hurdle, directly impacting the quality and relevance of search in each market.”

To ensure consistency while meeting language nuances, she continues, Kiabi strategy is for local and central teams to coordinate and adapt the experience to each country’s specifics.

Supporting a mindset of continuous improvement

“Algolia allows us to run A/B tests independently on the business side for specific settings and rules,” Alix, E-shop Manager at Kiabi, says. “This ‘test and learn’ approach helps to support performance and promotes an optimization mindset.”

She says the team loves how Algolia’s AI capabilities aid in their continuous improvement by both assisting customers and helping team members navigate Algolia documentation. The granularity Algolia offers, she continues, makes fine-tuning search by rule or category easy and seamless.

Improving performance through 2025 and beyond

Through 2025, as the Kiabi-Algolia partnership deepened, Kiabi developed a more strategic approach to ranking, optimizing Dynamic Re-ranking, and adopting Merchandising Studio, Recommend, Browse and Revenue Analytics as its search and discovery experience matured.

During this period, the teams collaborated closely on a UX review and redesign that examined: mobile search box visibility, autocomplete behavior, empty query states, filters, top product placement, no-result state and more — all to improve the customer journey.

The Results: Transforming Business through Search, Rankings and Recommendations

The impact of Kiabi’s ongoing search and discovery improvements has been telling, especially in crucial KPIs such as no-results rate, click-through rate (CTR), add-to-cart (ATC) and conversions from search.

“With Algolia, our customers get a smoother, more relevant search experience,” Maëva Pecqueur, E-shop Manager at Kiabi notes. “Dynamic Re-Ranking continuously improves results with relevant and seasonal offers. AI Synonyms helps better capture search intent and Recommend enhances product discovery with more coherent and useful suggestions throughout the journey.”

She notes a significant drop in the company’s no-results rate and that search conversion rate has increased to up four times that of sessions without search. The company’s Recommend launch in late 2025 — providing trending items on its homepage, related products on PDPs and frequently-bought-together items after add-to-cart — further boosted click-through rate by 15 points and add-to-cart rate by 10 points.

She continues: “On the team side, it helps us work more efficiently and in a more data-driven way, with fewer manual micro-optimizations and more focus on real business challenges and overall performance.”

Through its 2024 optimization, Kiabi reduced its global no-result rate by 24 percent over 2023, and its work in 2025 proved even more impressive. Kiabi witnessed:

• +20% click-through rate

• Another 27% drop in no-result rate

• Mobile add-to-cart up by 14.9% after activating DRR

• Desktop add-to-cart increased by 11.6% post-DRR

In 2026, Kiabi continues to improve its search and discovery KPIs as its marketplace expands into new countries.

Transforming ranking into revenue

As a fashion brand, Kiabi must ensure search results reflect the brands, sellers, offers and stock availability customers seek, while also providing clothing that meets the style, color and size expectations of every shopper. Search isn’t about matching keywords but meeting intent.

Kiabi worked with Algolia on an advanced ranking strategy that integrated signals such as search conversions, inventory score, sales performance, margin, sales count, stock by size and online availability. As the company expanded its marketplace, this ranking logic became even more strategic, helping Kiabi balance its own products with those of third-party sellers while preserving consistent customer experiences.

“We went from a manual approach of boosting and de-emphasizing products to a much more structured and dynamic approach based on tiebreaking. Tiebreaking challenges us every day and lets us update KPIs regularly to drive better performance,” Alix explains. “We’ve started some in-depth work on sizing stocks to ensure the best experience for our customers. The goal was to figure out the priority sizes so we could give them more weight in stock calculations.”

Collaboration is key

Algolia has been present at every step of Kiabi’s journey, helping the team improve search and discovery and acting as a true partner. 

“The difference really came from a great synergy between the Kiabi and Algolia teams, with regular exchanges and a real ability to move quickly on concrete issues. The e-shop team is very engaged in expressing needs, and Algolia’s support is responsive and present, which makes management much easier,” Alizée says.

She adds that having a solid, impact-oriented roadmap in place allowed Kiabi to make progress on areas that provided true business gains.

Dressed for the future

With online search and recommendations buttoned down, Kiabi has its sights set on further extending the logic of relevance to browsing and category pages. It will also depend on Algolia to support a consistent experience as its marketplace launches across new countries, with Belgium next in line.

AI-powered experiences are poised to play a significant role as Kiabi scales rich discovery capabilities across more surfaces, channels and geographies, even as its digital ecosystem becomes richer and more complex. “Generative AI will make the digital experience much more personalized and natural, with journeys that truly adapt to each customer's needs,” Alix says.

“We can also envision a more conversational search, where users express their needs directly and get more relevant and inspiring results.” Maëva adds  AI will help teams become more efficient in creating and enriching content and optimizing customer journeys.

In the years ahead, as Kiabi continues to work in close partnership with Algolia, Alizée predicts search will become faster and super-relevant, able to understand user intent and offer inspiring results from the first query. Ranking will allow fine control over product visibility while balancing business priorities, first- and third-party options and customer trust.

Finally, recommendations, she says, will naturally enhance the entire journey, delivering on the promise of helping families find what they need by offering relevant, contextual and engaging solutions. As the company moves away from a product-focused search and discovery experience, it aims to evolve toward a truly diversified platform that combines products, content, guides and more.

“Overall, the three components work together smoothly and coherently to create a personalized, high-performing, conversion-focused experience, while staying simple for the teams to manage.”