“We don’t usually work with vendors but we are incredibly impressed by what Searchspring can do. It’s probably one of the best platforms I’ve seen, and I’m a product manager. For me, it was all about the usability and giving power back to our marketing teams.”
Jamieson Yee
SVP, Global Product & QA at TechStyle Fashion Group
The Brand
Fabletics is recognized today as one of the fastest-growing brands in the history of ecommerce. Founded in 2013, Fabletics became the first label to bring the fashion-house approach into the activewear space. “We pioneered the flexible membership model, giving customers the option to choose whether they want to shop or skip each month,” says Jamieson Yee, SVP, Global Product & QA at TechStyle Fashion Group. “This innovative model coupled with our high quality, affordable product has really contributed to fast growth.”
By fusing style-centric design with high-performance technology, Fabletics is credited with evolving activewear from beyond the gym, into every walk of life. Driven by its VIP membership program serving over 2 million loyal members, Fabletics delivers premium quality at affordable prices. VIP members are offered new outfits each week, product discounts of up to 50%, and access to the game-changing Fabletics FIT app.
In 2019, Fabletics expanded their disruptive brand into the men’s space with the launch of Fabletics Men. Fabletics delivers new drops every week and is available in the US, Canada, and most of Europe. The brand’s full selection of activewear, accessories, shoes, and more can be experienced at fabletics.com and at the brand’s 50 state-of-the-art retail stores across the US.
The Challenges
Fabletics began as a digitally native brand that later expanded to brick-and-mortar stores. When it comes to market position, competition takes the form of both large-scale, expensive brands and discount department stores.
“You’ve got high-end activewear brands, you’ve got stores like Target coming out with their own lines of activewear, the market is just becoming more and more saturated,” says Jamieson. “We’re also competing against the likes of Nike and Adidas, but we’ve really found our own niche with Fabletics. We focus on core categories and we just do those categories really well.”
In the past, product discovery on their online store proved a challenge. “With the catalog sizes that we have, our customer just isn’t going to browse through 50 pages of product,” says Jamieson. Shoppers who arrived on the site without a specific product name in mind often struggled to narrow down their search based on style or attributes.
To address this, Fabletics initially explored building a search solution in-house. “We are a tech company as much as we are a fashion retail company. Generally, most of our technology is built proprietarily in-house, but we realized that it didn’t make sense for us to put our efforts into search when there was a solution available out of the box,” says Jamieson.
Fabletics also experienced a need for synonym’s on their products, especially with the release of their new shapewear brand, Yitty. Since Fabletics calls products in this line “Yitties”, they ran into issues with shoppers searching for terms such as “shapewear”. As a quick fix and easy fix, Fabletics used Searchspring reports to examine searches performed and added synonym’s so relevant products now display in search results.
The Solutions
The search functionality offered by Searchspring was “a huge win” for Fabletics, says Jamieson.
“The filters and semantic search capabilities mean that our customer can enter the attributes they want, or search using natural language to find the results they’re looking for. The merchandising tool is also super powerful for our marketing teams, the ability to create different campaigns and boost certain results is one of the things we’ve wanted from our search for a long time.”
Jamieson Yee
SVP, Global Product & QA at TechStyle Fashion Group
The team focuses on boosting a mix of new, bestselling, and in-stock products in a way that appeals to their shoppers, while also meeting timely business objectives. Because of the nature of their membership model, most sales occur in the first week of each month. New styles take priority during this period, as VIP members browse the latest arrivals. Alternative merchandising strategies are often applied to the same products in the weeks that follow.
Fabletics also regularly releases celebrity collaborations, and leverages merchandising tools to curate collection pages featuring their limited edition products. In addition, the brand creates merchandised landing pages for specific influencers, focusing on the products and promotions that the individual has showcased on their respective platform.
Enhanced reporting is another key benefit for the Fabletics team. “I think the thing I enjoy most about Searchspring is the insights and reporting. It’s really good for me to understand what contribution we’re actually seeing from Searchspring and how it’s really impacting our business,” says Jamieson.
“We don’t usually work with vendors but we are incredibly impressed with what Searchspring can do. It’s probably one of the best platforms I’ve seen, and I’m a product manager. For me, it was all about the usability and giving power back to our marketing teams.”
The Results
“The service that we’ve gotten from everyone who has worked on our account has been phenomenal. The fact that we’ve had some of the best customer service that I’ve ever seen from a vendor has made me feel even more confident about rolling Searchspring out to some of TechStyle’s other brands,” says Jamieson.
“There are many vendors out there who do search, but what I will say about Searchspring is, it really delivers on its promises. It’s a really powerful platform, the ease of use has been fantastic, and the customer service is second to none.”
Fabletics experienced a 102% increase in revenue from search since implementing Searchspring. Over that same time period, they had a 21% increase in Average Order Value (AOV) from search as opposed to a 3% increase in AOV without search*.
