Paul&Shark Leverages Site Search to Increase Revenue by 8.5% – Sourcing Journal
Success Story is a Sourcing Journal feature that highlights innovative solutions across all areas of the supply chain.
Traditional brands too often overlook the impact that effective search can have on the online shopping experience, but luxury Italian fashion brand Paul&Shark knows this part of e-commerce is essential to achieving its larger business goals. wide. As the brand expands its online presence globally, Paul&Shark has fully integrated advanced site search into its e-commerce strategy to capitalize on relevant products and improve visibility of adjacent items.
“Search is not just search, search is also merchandising in a way,” says Giuseppe Miriello, global digital director for Paul&Shark, a sportswear company that has been in business for nearly 50 years. years.
In 2021, the brand, known for its iconic water-repellent sweater, integrated Algolia’s search technology, an API-driven platform designed to create dynamic experiences that help organizations deliver the right product to the right consumer.
In the first month of using Algolia, Paul&Shark saw its overall revenue increase by 8.5%, while on-site conversion rates jumped by 9.6%. Search usage over this period increased by 38.9% (this number was higher for mobile users) and direct search revenue increased by more than 15%. The rise in revenue is even more notable when taking into account the company’s slight drop in average order value, as some consumers narrow their searches based on price.
Using the platform, Paul&Shark sought to create an intimate customer experience through highly relevant product listings while significantly reducing the maintenance needs of its e-commerce team.
Paul&Shark’s search function appears as a drop-down menu, with items changing in real time depending on what is typed into the search bar.
“From a brand perspective, this means that we are now able to better assess seasonal collections. People are more able to explore,” Miriello said. “We mainly make sweaters, hoodies and jackets, so an improved search engine has enabled our customers to find all the complementary products that they don’t usually discover when searching through categories.”
By clicking on a product, a shopper can scroll down the product page to see the “related products” recommended by the platform. For example, a shopper who finds black track pants will see other options to wear with the pants, including a white organic cotton t-shirt and white leather sneakers.
Smarter search
Miriello joined the retailer’s team in 2019 with a difficult task: to create an online store to serve all of Europe in just five months, before expanding it globally in a year. While the Covid-19 pandemic forced Miriello and her three-person team to speed up the process while working remotely, it didn’t hamper the outcome.
After doubling e-commerce sales in 2020, the e-commerce team also doubled in kind to six. As online orders rose again from 13,000 in 2020 to around 20,000 in 2021, Miriello knew the brand needed a platform that could speed up search operations.
Enter Algolia, which claims to handle more than 1.5 trillion search queries per year across more than 11,000 companies, including Under Armour, Lacoste, Birchbox and payments giant Stripe.
For the Paul&Shark team, Algolia’s first API solution proved to be quick to implement and easy to configure in multiple languages and geographies. The retailer rolled out Algolia’s search capabilities to the 109 countries it sells in in just two months, with the improved user experience and performance boosting SEO on the company’s website.
Additionally, the company has implemented a visual merchandising tool, designed for brands and retailers to promote high-performing products for popular searches, demote low-performing products, or substitute related products for searches that don’t yield results. of results.
Miriello and his team developed rules for finding and sorting products based on factors such as seasonality, product availability and popularity. This ensured that when a shopper searched for a new garment, the best-selling seasonal garments with high availability were at the top of the listings and pages.
“We are creating an algorithm that will pass our seasonality index through Algolia,” Miriello told Sourcing Journal. “What is the seasonality index? It is an index that indicates how well, on a scale of zero to one, the product corresponds to the average outdoor temperature by region. If I’m selling a jacket in October, I want to sell a medium weight jacket with medium loft.
The company made a name for itself on yachting collections inspired by the sea and was founded in 1975 by Paolo Dini after an inspiring visit to a small sailmaker’s workshop in Maine. During this visit, Dini found a sail from an old 18th century ship that caught his eye: the inscription read “Paul&Shark”. Dini, the eldest son of the owner of a now century-old clothing manufacturer based in Varese, Italy, is the father of Paul & Shark’s current president and CEO, Andrea Dini.
The company has since expanded its physical presence to more than 280 stores in 73 countries, with the brand hosting its physical locations in more exclusive urban shopping areas such as Via Montenapoleone in Milan and Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris. .
Going forward, the luxury retailer plans to implement auto-completion and AI-based reclassification to automate more time-consuming manual processes. These actions will further reduce the workload of their e-commerce team, allowing them to turn to new opportunities to create value and build loyalty.
These new features are all the more valuable to Paul&Shark as it focuses on sustainable and eco-friendly merchandise collections, including its Save the Sea jackets made from recycled polyester filaments and post plastic bottles. -consumer or regenerated nylon EcoNyl jackets.
“The search environment will provide the ability to search for ‘blue jacket’, ‘Save the Sea’ or ‘EcoNyl’ where we release the eco material first, so that we can direct searchers to the segment most greener part of our collection,” Mirello said. “It gives the brand a lot of power to leverage the collection’s premium points and drive the customer, even if it’s just for additional exposure.”