“Searchspring has been a huge time saver for us, it just makes life easier. The platform is really easy to use and the support and implementations teams have been very accommodating and responsive.”

Zhen Hann Leow
Group Ecommerce Manager, GAZMAN

The Brand

Australian menswear brand GAZMAN is a family-owned and run business that dates back to 1974. Part of the Austin Group of brands, they have over 80 retail locations across Australia, with products also available to purchase in department stores. 

“GAZMAN aims to make styling easy. We offer classic, casual styles that look good without a second thought,” says Zhen Hann Leow, Group Ecommerce Manager. “Our customers are very loyal, and most of them have been shopping with us for a long time.”

The Challenges

“In terms of our online presence, we try to make our site as easy-to-use as possible for our core demographic, many of whom are infrequent online shoppers,” says Zhen. “During the pandemic, online shopping became the only option for our customers for a while, so it was even more important for us to showcase our products in the best light online.”

Prioritizing products with availability in a full size curve is a key focus of GAZMAN’s ecommerce strategy. However, previous solutions failed to offer this level of customization and control over product display. As a result, the team was forced to manually update product arrangement as stock levels changed. 

“Sometimes we run out of fringe sizes like S or XXL, but we still have lots of units available in the sizes in between. The solutions that we used in the past would rank those products highly within category pages based on total unit numbers available, but it was really important for us to make sure our size curve was always completely full for products on the first page of a category, to make a good first impression on our customers.”

During a replatform to Shopify Plus, GAZMAN’s digital agency, DotDev, recommended Searchspring’s solutions to overcome these challenges.

The Solutions

“With Searchspring, we now have the ability to boost products by the fullness of their size curve. That rule was actually custom made for us by the Searchspring team, and it’s been really helpful. We were really impressed by how quickly they built out new functionality for us,” says Zhen. 

Boost rules are also applied to demote products based on particular attributes. “We like having the ability to deprioritize certain product types on some of our larger pages, depending on factors like the weather, or product pricing. It’s also great to have Searchspring’s reporting connected to our Google Analytics account, which helps inform which products we decide to boost ourselves, or when we set rules to automatically boost products based on sales.” 

The team ensures consistency between their online and in-store shopping experiences by pinning relevant products to the top of category pages. “In combination with our boost rules, we sometimes pin the first few rows of products to reflect our current marketing campaigns. Searchspring gives us that flexibility and control.”

Having chosen Searchspring for its easy integration with Shopify Plus, the GAZMAN team now uses both solutions seamlessly. “Our campaigns can change at the last minute. The combination of Shopify’s native collection rules with Searchspring’s boost rules and sub-sorting has helped us to make those changes quickly, without having to prepare and schedule everything in advance.”

While merchandising has been the main priority for GAZMAN, they have also found opportunities to improve the online shopping experience through site search. “Through Searchspring’s Zero Search Results report, we discovered customers were often getting no results for key product types we stock, due to using search terms that didn’t quite match our product titles. Our customer success manager flagged that and helped us set up search synonyms to direct those searches to relevant results. That was a really easy win.”

The Results

“Searchspring has been a huge time saver for us, it just makes life easier. The platform is really easy to use and the support and implementations teams have been very accommodating and responsive,” says Zhen.

“We recently decided to roll Searchspring out to other brands within the Austin Group based on the positive experience we’ve had on the GAZMAN store. We are confident that the platform will add value to our other ecommerce sites by enhancing our online shopping experience across the board.”

Year-over-year after implementing Searchspring, GAZMAN experienced a significant increase in search usage on their store, as well as a boost in orders and revenue attributed to search.