I search through your content to help you find answers to your questions, fast.
Algolia helps fashion retailers uplift revenue and ROI
Powerful search and discovery is critical to creating the engaging and meaningful customer experiences that shoppers now expect.
Online retailers who provide fast, relevant search results are quick to reap the rewards. In the online fashion space, this isn’t an exception; it’s the rule.
That was the experience of these four leading global fashion retailers who improved search speed and relevance, and added rich features like personalization — all without increasing the burden on their internal development teams.
Customers want fast, accurate results and personalized recommendations while searching in everyday language. Online fashion retailers may have specific individual aims and issues they need to address, but all share the common goal of making search more convenient for their customers.
These four fashion brands used Algolia’s products and expertise to improve their search performance and transform the user experience for their customers, while empowering their teams with quick-to-market sales and merchandising solutions.
In the fast-moving world of online fashion retailing, staying competitive is a challenge.
According to a recent McKinsey report, fashion retailers need to balance the demand for fast, frictionless shopping with a combination of very high product return rates, growing customer acquisition costs, and increasingly fragmented supply chains.
As a consequence, improving customer loyalty through search and merchandising capabilities, as well as streamlining backend processes and analytics, are critical as brands jockey for position and customer attention.
With an array of tools and capabilities designed specifically for fashion brands, such as AI agentic solutions for shopping assistants, editorial-style AI-driven shopping guides, and powerful intent-based search, Algolia empowers brands, helping them create meaningful user journeys that deliver conversions, inspiration, and delighted return customers.
“We use Algolia as our source of truth because of its consistency around how it supports our product feed and discovery on our site.”
Director of Global Digital Merchandising and Campaigns, Arc’teryx
Vancouver-based Arc’teryx is a Canadian outdoor apparel and equipment company known for its high-performance alpine gear.
The company focuses on radical innovations that bring an evolutionary leap in technology and functionality, liberating customers from environmental constraints.
Arc’teryx has expanded to include satellite offices in Portland, Munich, and Tokyo, while maintaining on-site design, manufacturing, and testing facilities outside Vancouver in British Columbia’s rugged, wet Coast Mountains.
The company began investigating search engine tools to support its fast-growing direct-to-consumer (DTC) strategy. With no advanced search tool in place, Arc’teryx needed a scalable, reliable solution that could enhance both revenue and the online experience.
To upgrade the customer journey and DTC sales, Arc’teryx’s parent company, Amer Sports, decided to implement Algolia to improve product discovery and search relevance, empowering the Arc’teryx merchandising team.
“We were shifting from a wholesale model to a DTC experience. Algolia’s seamless integration with our product feeds and site experience was a key deciding factor.”
Director of Global Digital Merchandising and Campaigns, Arc’teryx
In just four months, Arc’teryx went from having no advanced search technology to offering a high-performance Algolia product discovery experience to its online customers.
The goal was to implement an agile, personalized journey for users. To do that, Arc’teryx deployed Algolia across its product listing pages and campaign experiences as part of a broader product discovery journey.
To support its merchandising efforts and more effectively tailor discovery for its site’s visitors, the company implemented a host of Algolia features and capabilities, moving from limited in-house tools to a fully integrated Algolia solution with advanced AI-powered search and discovery features.
The Arc’teryx team worked closely with Algolia to adopt its new search solution, benefiting from regular meetings and strategic checkpoints throughout the implementation. The teams also put into place stronger analytics to understand how visitors engage with the brand at both country- and language-specific levels.
Today, Arc’teryx leverages Algolia to create a sleek, intuitive discovery experience, eliminating the frustration of empty search results and elevating relevant products at key moments, beyond just seasonal drops.
Algolia has been a vital partner to the Arc’teryx team, not just during its implementation but also as part of a renewed merchandising focus, helping teams improve personalization capabilities and A/B-test new merchandising strategies.
For Arc’teyx, Algolia Search is a go-to solution.
It streamlines navigating functions and features, offering teams an intelligent, agile technology that makes it easy to curate and monitor search terms and ensures relevant products are promoted, particularly during important campaigns and promotions.
“The control we have over rule settings for an event like Black Friday or Cyber Week has been extremely useful. Algolia AI makes it easy to provide suggested links that promote popular products or searches, as well as specific product categories.”
Digital Marketing Specialist, Arc’teryx
An Algolia customer since 2019, END. is a global retailer based in Newcastle, England. Founded in 2005 and driven by a passion for fashion, sneakers, and luxury streetwear culture, the company has grown significantly over its 20-year history.
Today, END. has a strong and valued relationship with more than 500 brands and designers and has built a community of fashion-conscious young customers through its global ecommerce sites.
To serve its growing customer base, END. needed a sleek online experience that would make the customer journey seamless and relevant across multiple locales — from discovery to payment.
The company wanted to improve their community-oriented user experience and upgrade both search solution capabilities and analytics. Additionally, their existing site and search architecture didn’t allow for easy integration of innovative AI search and gen AI customization capabilities.
“It was really about building a partnership. Algolia spends a lot of time, money, and resources on research and development, and making sure that it is the best in class for not only product search and findability, but also recommendations. And there are some really cool things happening with AI that we’ve been privileged to beta test.”
Head of Product, Payments and Fraud, End. Clothing
END. deployed Algolia across its sites to enhance search and indexing, implementing Search, Browse, and Recommend capabilities. It has also tweaked Recommend over the years to meet the unique needs of its international customer base.
Working with Algolia, the END. Clothing team built a system that sends the right data – including customer information, transaction details, pricing, and stock levels – to Algolia tools. Now Recommendations can generate high-quality product suggestions automatically without the need for manual in-house team curation.
“We anticipate that Algolia Recommend will be a big win for the business, as we can then recommend other products for sold-out or dead-end journeys. Instead of turning to a competitor for an out-of-stock product, customers are now given alternatives that meet their criteria.”
Head of Product, Payments and Fraud, End. Clothing
Algolia is now integral to END. Clothing’s sales and marketing strategy. The team is now looking to take even greater advantage of Algolia AI’s search tools and capabilities.
The END. team feel that they are only scratching the surface of what they can achieve with Algolia. Tasks such as analyzing failed searches can now be managed with minimal developer involvement, enabling the team to make more changes independently.
Testing is continuing around revenue driven by Algolia’s Dynamic Re-ranking (DRR).
As its next step, with the help of Algolia, END. will duplicate indexes across its UK and US websites and localize content to support regional optimization. This represents a massive step up for the business.
Shoe Carnival is one of America’s largest family footwear retailers. It boasts exceptionally convenient shopping reach with more than 400 retail locations across 35 states and Puerto Rico, along with a mobile app and website.
The company takes pride in creating a unique shopping experience and competitive pricing strategy while offering a wide selection of both brand-name and private-label footwear for women, men, and children.
Providing customers with daily promotions and new product drops every month means speed and agility are critical to achieving the remarkable digital customer experience that Shoe Carnival clients expect.
To keep up with market and business changes, the Shoe Carnival team knew they had to act quickly; however, with outdated content management and search solutions, every change required developer involvement.
This made it difficult to react quickly to the market and keep up with the fast-moving retail landscape and its changing customer expectations.
Shoe Carnival’s ecommerce merchandisers knew they needed new tools that would let them make changes easily, without creating a ticket or going through a development team.
“Prior to Algolia, even simple changes to our retail site required support from the development team. Now, we just see a need, we see what the customer is asking for, and can quickly implement an effective solution.”
Director of Ecommerce, Shoe Carnival
Recognizing Algolia as the right fit for their ecommerce technology stack going forward, Shoe Carnival chose to adopt Algolia AI Search as the solution of choice for its new composable ecommerce architecture.
The new technology provided sales and marketing teams with the ease of use and maneuverability they needed. Now, business users can make changes quickly without any coding or developer involvement. New search rules, such as pinning specific products to result pages or adjusting how products are listed, can be implemented easily by the merchandising team.
Their new search platform is not only saving time and taking the load off the company’s developers, but also helping Shoe Carnival achieve its future-forward merchandising goals and be faster to market with game-changing improvements.
The company can quickly respond to seasonal changes that are vital to merchandising. Meanwhile, the insights from Algolia analytics provide the data points that enable more granular control over campaigns, helping make smarter data-driven decisions to improve customer experiences.
Shoe Carnival increased the overall conversion rate on the product listing page by about 4.5% and improved productivity using Algolia’s AI capabilities, freeing up the merchandising team to focus on other impactful activities.
“With Algolia’s analytic capabilities, we’ve been able to learn from our customers and identify the online experiences that really resonate and convert the best.”
Director of Ecommerce, Shoe Carnival
Founded in 1991 and based in Montrevault-sur-Evre, France, Gémo is an affordably-priced retail chain offering fashion for the whole family. Gémo has both a strong online presence and more than 400 brick-and-mortar stores.
Named for its founder, Gérard Biotteau, and his wife, Simone, the retailer has expanded in both geography and channels, opening 35 stores outside France and building a strong ecommerce presence while employing more than 3,600 people.
Boasting strong and growing omnichannel capabilities, Gémo sought to transform its operations to meet increasing consumer demand. As a consequence, improving the online experience through better search and discovery was a logical next step.
Additionally, optimizing customer satisfaction with a better online shopping experience was vital to the company’s growth. But the search engine, native to its ecommerce platform, proved to be too basic, difficult to customize, and incapable of surfacing and fine-tuning the most relevant results.
To improve the customer experience, Gémo turned to Algolia to transform basic, non-customizable search capabilities into a powerful revenue driver, empowering business teams with intuitive tools to execute data-driven merchandising strategies.
To support its growing digital ambitions, Gémo selected Algolia for its easy-to-use and easy-to-implement search and discovery solutions. With Algolia AI, business teams now have the data visibility and control they need.
“Prior to Algolia, our existing search capabilities were limited. We couldn’t highlight categories, brands, or suggestions, and on the back end, it was difficult to manage the platform or the online experience without developer support.”
Category Manager, Gémo
The company’s digital merchandising teams could now operate autonomously and unlock advanced, easy-to-configure capabilities.
With Dynamic Re-ranking, Gémo can automatically prioritize the most relevant products based on user behavior, helping improve relevance at scale, especially across its very large product catalog.
At the same time, AI Synonyms helps reduce no-results queries, ensuring customers can find what they’re looking for even when search terms vary, minimizing frustration.
Looking ahead, Gémo is implementing Query Categorization and exploring more advanced search and personalization capabilities. They are also planning to develop a more conversational experience powered by agentic AI.
“Given the size of our catalog, managing it manually isn’t feasible. Dynamic Re-ranking allows us to automate at scale.”
Category Manager, Gémo
Algolia has delivered outstanding results. These include overcoming Gémo’s challenges with data control and autonomy, and, with the adoption of advanced features, strengthening the visibility of best-selling products and adapting to seasonal shifts in demand.
“Algolia is at the heart of our digital strategy. Our investment has proven very profitable: conversions have doubled when customers use our new Algolia-powered search features.”
Category Manager, Gémo
The new platform is easy to manage and requires minimal ongoing maintenance, allowing teams to focus on higher-value initiatives. Since activating Dynamic Re-ranking, the company has seen conversions increase by more than 2x.
ROI has been clear and demonstrable. The digital team has easily proven that search and discovery optimization has paid off in spades. Gémo independently validated a remarkable ROI of 160 times its investment.
Today, search and discovery sit at the core of Gémo’s digital strategy, driving one-third of online revenue and doubling conversion rates, while laying the foundation for future AI-powered experiences.
These fashion brands achieved exceptional results using Algolia AI. Your business could be next. Get a customized demo from our AI search experts today.
.webp)
%20(2).svg)
