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“Right out of the box,
Algolia has good usability”
Paul&Shark lifted conversions, grew revenue and built customer loyalty
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About Paul&Shark
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Introduction
- Giuseppe Miriello, Paul&Shark’s Global Digital Director
Search performance and product listing pages needed improvement
The Journey to Success
Introduction
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Manual merchandising processes too work intensive
Need for a quick to implement and fast to optimize solution
This luxury clothing retailer needed an out-of-the-box solution to support a massive increase of online orders
Why Paul&Shark chose Algolia
Challenges to Paul&Shark success
Search performance and product listing pages needed improvement
Manual merchandising was too work intensive
Needed a solution that was fast to implement and optimize
Quick to implement and configure
Flexible and scalable
Multilanguage and synonym support, and geographic footprint
Easy integration with their existing Adobe Commerce platform
Results
+8.5%
Increase in Revenue
+9.5%
Increase in Conversions
Improved customer experience
Reduced workload on Ecomm team
Better SEO and website performance
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About Paul&Shark
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About Paul&Shark
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Introduction
The Challenge/Solution
Founded in the mid-1970s, after the eldest son of the owner of a now 100-years-old clothing company based in Varese, Italy, had an inspirational visit to a small sailmaker’s workshop in Maine, Paul&Shark has become an international brand synonymous with high quality.
From its beginning with its iconic water-repellent sweater that would become an icon of the Paul&Shark style, the company has retained a focus on designing stylish and high-performance garments.
Today, Paul&Shark has expanded to become a comprehensive smart casual and luxury sportswear brand available in the most exclusive shopping areas of 73 different countries and world-wide through the recently launched E-Commerce.
2019
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2010
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A mandate to go digital… fast!
Miriello joined Paul&Shark in 2019 and was tasked to build an online store to serve all of Europe in just five months, and then to extend it to reach globally within a year.
“We needed a solution to speed-up visual merchandising and search operations. We needed it fast and Algolia was the perfect one.”
13K
Orders in 2020
20K
Orders in 2021
6 people
Team Size
Impossible
Workload
Improving customer experience while reducing workloads
Miriello was familiar with Algolia and its focus on relevance. “I knew this was a job for Algolia,” he recalls. Competitors lacked the breadth of features and focused too exclusively on re-ranking versus relevance.
“What counts most for a brand like Paul&Shark is not just to sell as much as possible,” he notes. “We have to sell the right style at the right price at the right time. We want to communicate specific styles with specific times of the year.” For that, he says, the ecommerce team needed more granular control of relevance and powerful visual merchandising capabilities.
Refocusing on new value and growing revenue
The reduced workload that its new visual merchandising capabilities provided the ecommerce team has allowed them to focus attention on efforts on new opportunities to build value and grow customer loyalty. For example, the team increased the frequency of customer email newsletters from two to three per week.
The Paul&Shark website has also seen a boost in SEO resulting from the improved user experience and performance that Algolia provides. Pages render and load more quickly for customers, further improving experience and conversions.
And Algolia opens the door for other technologies. The efficiency it brings behind the scenes affords an opportunity to implement other solutions that might otherwise burden the website too much and compromise the customer experience.
Further proof of the vastly improved customer experience may seem counterintuitive for some, suggests Miriello. Customers are spending less time on the Paul&Shark website. He says this metric being a positive KPI came as a surprise within the company, familiar with the physical wholesale business.
“The less people stay on the website, the more efficient it has been for them. This is important, because it increases the probability that they will return, because they find what they want quickly.”
With Algolia, Paul&Shark met its targets and more, giving shoppers an exceptional experience and unburdening teams to pursue brand new value streams. The next steps for this luxury brand will be exciting to watch.
Miriello attributes all this improved performance to the new and improved search functionality and merchandising capabilities. “Algolia was the only thing we deployed in this timeframe; it’s pretty straightforward.”
Use of search by customers in that same period, from mid-October to mid-November 2021, increased by a whopping 38.9 percent — even higher for mobile users that represent the lion’s share of Paul&Shark customers — while revenue directly resulting from search grew more than 15 percent. This was even with a small, expected decrease in average order value, as some customers refine their searches based purely on price.
- Giuseppe Miriello, Paul&Shark’s Global Digital Director
He implemented Algolia to improve search relevance but also, importantly, to remove the manual processes previously used to build product listing pages.
In only two short months, Paul&Shark successfully deployed Algolia’s search, dynamic re-ranking, visual merchandising, advanced multi-indices management for the 108 countries it sells into, and synonym capabilities for queries. Plans are in place to implement auto-completion and AI re-ranking in the weeks — not months — ahead. Further ahead, he hopes to deploy recommendations to further reduce the workload on the ecommerce team by streamlining what is now a manual process in Magento.
Miriello and his team developed rules for search and product sorting based on key factors such as seasonality, product availability, and popularity, ensuring that when a customer looks for a new article of clothing, best selling seasonal wear with the highest availability would reside highest on lists and pages.
He attributes Algolia’s flexibility in allowing the ecommerce team to combine AI-based and human merchandising, so Paul&Shark can meet the requirements of specific marketing campaigns on product listing pages while still using Algolia for the heavy lifting of product sorting.
Reduced workload for the team
Achievements
1 month
Using Algolia for
+8.52%
Revenue
+9.55%
Conversion Rate
- Giuseppe Miriello, Paul&Shark’s Global Digital Director
“Right out of the box, Algolia has good usability.”
By 2021, with its store operating globally, the company looked at how it could improve the customer experience while reducing the workload of its team of six people. Miriello determined that the website’s search capabilities needed to be improved significantly, as well as the process of populating its product listing pages.
- Giuseppe Miriello, Paul&Shark’s Global Digital Director
“In the beginning, we had to rush to complete and complete and complete. And then COVID hit, and we had to complete the process working from home.”
13K
Orders in 2020
20K
Orders in 2021
6 people
Team Size
Impossible
Workload
- Giuseppe Miriello, Paul&Shark’s Global Digital Director
“You can use Algolia to increase sales, but our perspective has always been to use it to serve customers online a better experience with more relevant searches. The fact that I see the number of searches rising, tells me that our customers are enjoying the experience.”
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- Giuseppe Miriello, Paul&Shark’s Global Digital Director
- Giuseppe Miriello, Paul&Shark’s Global Digital Director
Better user experience
Optimized merchandising strategy
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Paul&Shark now combines a century of sartorial expertise with digital capabilities and modern technology, bringing its Italian style, Varesini values and craftsmanship to a global stage.
Founded
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Founded in the mid-1970s, after the eldest son of the owner of a now 100-years-old clothing company based in Varese, Italy, had an inspirational visit to a small sailmaker’s workshop in Maine, Paul&Shark has become an international brand synonymous with high quality.
Beginning
Click to explore
From its beginning with its iconic water-repellent sweater that would become an icon of the Paul&Shark style, the company has retained a focus on designing stylish and high-performance garments.
Today, Paul&Shark has expanded to become a comprehensive smart casual and luxury sportswear brand available in the most exclusive shopping areas of 73 different countries and world-wide through the recently launched E-Commerce.
2019
Click to explore
A global luxury brand with local Italian roots
Today
Click to explore
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The Journey to Success
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The Journey to Success
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About Paul&Shark
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About Paul&Shark
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Introduction
