“I’ve seen other solutions that were nowhere near as detailed or complete in capabilities as Searchspring. Some only give you basic functions based on pages, views, and add-to-carts. With Searchspring, we can do so much more. Prioritising product display based on the percentage of inventory or size curve is just one example of how much more robust the Searchspring solution is.”

Chris Ventura
Global Ecommerce Manager, 2XU

The Brand

Founded in 2005, 2XU (pronounced “two times you”) brings performance and technology together. The company provides sports-minded consumers with ultimate technical compression and activewear apparel to maximise performance and minimise recovery time.

Former professional triathlete Jamie Hunt partnered with retail guru Clyde Davenport (Founder and previous Owner of Davenport Industries) and marketing specialist Aidan Clarke to launch 2XU. The company then worked with the Australian Institute of Sport and RMIT to manufacture clothing that compresses parts of the body to improve blood flow for faster recovery from sporting activity. Appealing to a loyal base of elite sportspeople, athletes, and weekend warriors, 2XU has seen inspiring growth, now available in over 70 countries worldwide.

The Challenges

2XU is a globally-leading sports compression brand with many technical elements to its products. To more effectively understand consumer needs and connect with shoppers, the company looked to update its tech stack.

The company’s Ecommerce Coordinator also manually merchandised product display and collection pages based on external system analytics. Products were painstakingly prioritised based on trend analysis and then replicated to a multitude of collections across the company’s four different domains. 2XU needed a full-time resource to manage this process.

The company needed a more capable website search, merchandising, and personalisation platform to help merchandisers save time, intimately understand shopper behaviour, and more effectively tell the brand story.

“Between Searchspring’s Technical Support and Customer Success Teams, the level of support we’ve received has been outstanding. In many instances, Searchspring has worked directly with our Shopify Plus Agency development team (Convert Digital), giving us a largely ‘hands-off’ technical approach, just needing our final approval of the outcomes. Our Customer Success Manager, Jacinda, has also been amazing. She’s continually helping us refine the platform and uncover new opportunities to get more value out of it.”

The Solutions

Searchspring has revolutionised merchandising across 2XU’s four global sites. The company’s Ecommerce Coordinator can now set automated rules and configurations to prioritise products for each shopper within collections. Additionally, Searchspring’s intelligent algorithms and AI-learning models understand and adapt to shopper behaviours, helping to boost conversion by placing the perfect products in front of each shopper.

Searchspring’s automated merchandising tools have freed up significant time for the team. As a result, they can now focus on projects that increase sales and enhance business operations.

Chris elaborates, “Where I think we gain the most value from Searchspring is having the merchandising side of things pretty much managed for us. We know that what’s being shown to shoppers is based on our pre-configured rules, designed to have the most commercial impact. I can’t emphasise enough the amount of time and effort this saves for our coordinators – and the sales outcomes it helps us create.”

“Searchspring is one of the easiest systems we work with. The UI is super clean and simple. The back-end is also structured clearly, so you intuitively know where to go. It’s easy to navigate, easy for us to access support, and easy for us to jump between regions and make adjustments.”

Merchandising has also been minimised for the company’s sales events, with the 2XU confident of consistent top-of-collection placement for commercially-optimised products. The team uses Searchspring’s advanced rule to define product display order based on inventory availability, sales history, and other crucial factors.

As a result, Black Friday events require minimal merchandising, with customers arriving at landing pages that are already optimised to drive sales. Additionally, the team uses Searchspring’s inline banners throughout these landing pages. These inline banners enhance the brand experience, provide concise messages about product benefits, and further emphasise the promotion.

Even in more specific scenarios, Searchspring provides the flexibility to override automation and manage products individually. For example, 2XU chose to run a site-wide promotion on a new jacket that had sold fewer units than existing alternatives. The team specifically prioritised this item to boost its visibility and further support marketing campaigns and featured homepage banners.

“Searchspring has been pivotal to helping us learn how customers interact with our site, rather than how we think they should interact with it. With this knowledge, we can now shape our strategies across our site. In a nutshell, we’re choosing to be consumer-led. We’re listening to what customers tell us through filters and search queries and creating the right stories to meet their intent.”

The Results

From 2021 to 2023, 2XU’s largest domain (Australia) experienced an incredible 100% increase in revenue from search-driven activity. The company’s second-largest domain (USA) has also seen a 25% boost from search in the same period. Search functionality has also lifted the AU site’s conversion rate by 16% since 2021.

Crucially, Searchspring’s advanced filters and associated analytics enable Chris and the team to intimately understand customers’ priorities rather than relying on assumptions. For example, data from faceted search shows which colour options and product lines are the most (and least) popular among shoppers. This critical information allows the team to refine and adjust filter options. They are then equipped with data to accurately shape the brand story and improve the customer journey across the 2XU site.

The time savings gained by using Searchspring have also been immense. 2XU now has one resource merchandising four regions, which takes a fraction of their week rather than entire days each week to manage.

Chris adds, “Without Searchspring, I’d be spending a lot of time ensuring products are correctly prioritised, constantly reviewing data, closely following inventory movements and trends, pulling more reports, diving into several systems, and making manual adjustments every week. With Searchspring, I know that everything’s set up the right way to automate and take the worry out of merchandising.”

“My advice for anyone in ecommerce would be to not do something just for the sake of doing it – or because your competitors are doing it. Listen to your consumers. Look at the data and how they’re interacting with your site. Then, you can make commercially-optimised decisions that will benefit your website and the customer experience.”