“We wanted a platform that would improve the experience – both for customers and our ecommerce and buying teams. I knew we could boost conversions from search results by offering our customers a more intuitive, streamlined search experience. Our merchandising was also heavily reliant on manual processes and was taking a lot of time and effort to curate pages. Searchspring has solved both challenges in one search, merchandising, and personalisation platform.”
Matt Page
Head of Digital and Marketing, St Frock
The Brand
St Frock began as the big dream of a small-town girl in the countryside of Australia. Founder and CEO Sandradee Makejev wanted to deliver a special kind of apparel. She was inspired to make clothing that could be the go-to for that interview, event, first date, or challenging day when customers needed to feel their best.
St Frock uniquely connects with customers in the competitive fashion retail space by selling beautiful dresses that fit all sizes at affordable prices.
Since launching in 2010, the company has seen impressive continuous growth. Today, St Frock has 100+ dedicated employees, operates two website domains, and is growing globally with a keen focus on the USA market.
The Challenges
St Frock wanted to improve how customers navigated their broad catalogue of inspiring designs. The team also saw an opportunity to support future growth without the heavy lifting. To do this, they needed a complete feature set across search, merchandising, and personalisation features.
Merchandising, in particular, was an incredibly manual, time-consuming process that wasn’t getting the full attention it needed. As an online fashion retailer, St Frock realised the massive benefit of automating their merchandising controls.
“Many tools out there focus on search but don’t have the same automated merchandising capability. The balance of search, filtering, merchandising, product recommendations and exciting new features we’re testing made Searchspring the obvious choice. Other applications I’ve used over the years have been powerful but quite complex to use, which means that teams don’t get the full value from them.
“Having an early adopter mindset and the ability to move quickly is in our company’s DNA. It’s what enables us to make meaningful changes that benefit our customers. Searchspring was fast to pick up, made reporting and analysis easy, and allowed us to make tested, data-driven decisions. We’ve also gained early access to Searchspring features to continue innovating the shopper experience.”
Matt Page
Head of Digital and Marketing, St Frock
The Solutions
Searchspring has helped St Frock put the right products in front of the right customers with optimised search, merchandising, and personalisation. Improved search and advanced product filters provide a better shopper experience by helping shoppers find products they love and add to cart faster. Product page banners, badges, and recommendations such as ‘you may also like’ further enhance the shopper journey throughout St Frock’s extensive collection.
Additionally, the merchandising team can now curate collections more efficiently, leveraging boost rules to automatically promote products such as best sellers, new releases, re-stocked, and more.
St Frock has also adapted their merchandising rules with adjustments for seasonality and stock availability in the USA. This approach streamlines processes and shows customers exactly what they want, from wherever they shop.
“We’re using geo-merchandising for the USA to automatically boost summer products during the Australian winter, and vice-versa. With the time we’ve saved from automated merchandising and boost rules, we’re further refining the search experience. We’ve gained deeper insights, improved relevancy, and now have more time for conversion and optimisation activities across the site. A/B testing also lets us reduce the amount of internal discussion around changes. The quality data we now have to back up ideas means we’re making more impactful changes to the shopper experience.”
Matt Page
Head of Digital and Marketing, St Frock
The Results
St Frock has undergone a redesign, a move to Shopify Plus with Acid Green, and the implementation of Searchspring. And the results speak for themselves. The company has driven an incredible 30% increase in total revenue YOY and experienced an 18% increase in conversions since implementing Searchspring.
Additionally, St Frock has more shoppers using on-site search, jumping from 6% to 10%. This increase is significant because St Frock has seen a 20% increase in average transaction value from search since going live with Searchspring.
The company is also taking advantage of new personalisation features, such as Searchspring’s Personalised Email Recommendations, which use real shopper behaviour to recommend products in Klaviyo email campaigns to further enhance the shopper experience.
“My advice to anyone looking to enhance the shopper experience is to bring human-centric thinking to the table. Bring out the knowledge of your team and in-house specialists and identify how to make things easier for your customers. Searchspring has helped us to do exactly that. With insights from the Searchspring platform, we’ve made product categories and terms more customer-friendly, and that helps drive a better overall experience”.
Matt Page
Head of Digital and Marketing, St Frock
