“Why Searchspring? For us, there were two main drivers. The first was positive referrals from other people using the product, and we had a number of those. The second was the amazing team behind it. The way to win in ecommerce is with an extremely personalized journey, and Searchspring gives you the ability to do that.”

Emma Mcilroy
CEO of Wildfang

The Brand

Wildfang is a female-founded clothing company that sets out to create “a home for badass women everywhere”.

With a strong focus on a woman’s right to be and wear whatever she wants, the brand is best known for its signature ‘Wild Feminist’ collection, workwear, and button-ups.

The customer is at the heart of every aspect of the Wildfang brand, and nowhere is this more pronounced than on their ecommerce store. The copy is bold, the images are attention-grabbing, and the models are diverse. Every step of the shopping experience reflects Wildfang’s mission to build a community that their shoppers can belong to.

As a self-described “omnichannel, direct-to-consumer lifestyle brand”, Wildfang’s greatest challenge is creating a seamless, end-to-end shopping experience that is personalized to the individual shopper. That, and differentiation.

“There’s a lot of noise in our category. To stand out, you have to differentiate your business and build a clear brand that stands for something,” says CEO, Emma Mcilroy.

The Challenges

Online search and merchandising have always played a part in Wildfang’s ecommerce strategy.

“We’ve always been well aware of which factors are likely to affect conversions. Search is your lowest hanging fruit. It’s the highest-converting traffic, so even a small increase in search usage is going to dramatically impact revenue,” says Emma.

“In terms of merchandising, we focused on a number of key factors, including price point, color, in-stock availability, newness, and categories.”

However, managing all of these aspects of the site was a highly manual process that demanded time and resources. As a small team, this wasn’t an option. What’s more, the speed at which the team could update and adjust the site ultimately affected how quickly and easily shoppers could find the right products.

“The single biggest driver of conversion and revenue in ecommerce is speed. No one wants to spend a lot of time on a site. The ability to guide a customer to what they’re looking for as fast as humanly possible is a huge win for us, which is what Searchspring does,” says Emma.

The Benefits

Control, scalability, and dynamic updates are three of the key benefits of Searchspring, according to Hayley Forsyth, Digital Marketing Manager at Wildfang.

By automating product results based on factors like stock levels and popularity, the Wildfang team has gained more time to focus on other priorities, and customers are enjoying a more intuitive shopping experience.

“Depending on what rules we have in place, as soon as a certain item becomes more popular and more of a revenue-driver, it’s going to automatically move up in our pages. Likewise, if an item starts to run low on inventory, it automatically moves down. Having control over those rules, and which ones are most important to our business metrics and KPIs at any given time, has had a huge impact… Also, having all of the analytics built into the platform itself has streamlined the process, for sure,” says Emma.

The Results

In the first four months of using Searchspring, Wildfang’s:

• Conversion rate with search increased by 24%
• Revenue per visit with search increased by 17%
• Overall revenue from search grew by 9% while the percentage of shoppers using search remained constant.