CUSTOMER STORYElevating online search to transform digital product discovery.

With 100 million annual website visits across its 4 e-commerce sites, Crate & Barrel needed a search solution that could match its reputation for excellence.

“We’ve noticed a higher conversion rate. There’s an increase in add to carts and order value as we are continuing to serve up more relevant items to our customers.”

— Aaron Veit, Director of Digital Product Management, Crate & Barrel

The search for better commerce search

Crate & Barrel is known for its high-quality home furnishings offered in customizable colors to fit any room. With products ranging from couches to waffle irons, outdoor dining tables to Christmas tree ornaments, the retailer manages thousands of SKUs across its 100 physical stores and 4 e-commerce sites. Each year, more than 22 million customers visit Crate & Barrel stores and 100 million visit its website searching for just the right items to complete their home designs.

However, the company faced a significant challenge: its website’s search engine wasn’t making product discovery easy or intuitive. Shoppers’ searches often returned irrelevant results or none at all, even when Crate & Barrel had exactly what customers were looking for.

Take, for instance, a customer searching for a “magnet board” for their home office renovation. Despite having the product in inventory, the search would fail to connect shoppers with the right items:

Merchandising challenges

The problem extended beyond the customer experience. For the merchandising team, managing search results for thousands of products across multiple categories created a substantial workload.

“It’s really challenging for the merchant team to be able to stay on top of merchandising, being so granular and manually updating search terms along the way. We have product categories for both indoor and outdoor — all aspects of the home — so it really puts a burden on our merchandising team to be continuously making updates, enhancements, and improvements to search results.” — Aaron Veit, Director of Digital Product Management, Crate & Barrel

As its SKU count continued to grow, Crate & Barrel recognized that machine learning could provide the support needed to improve both the customer experience and merchandising efficiency. However, its existing search platform had limited ML capabilities, offered no personalization options, and lacked merchandising tools to help the team work more effectively.

Finding the right solution

To elevate its e-commerce search to match the level of service excellence Crate & Barrel is known for, its Digital Product team partnered with Lucidworks. The team believed Lucidworks’ commerce solution, with its advanced ML capabilities, personalization features, and Predictive Merchandiser tool, aligned perfectly with the company’s objectives.

Hosted on Google Cloud, the solution leverages Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to manage the search engine at scale through containerized deployments. This allows for quick development, testing, and release of new features. The accessibility, stability, and strong security foundation provided by Google Cloud were all top priorities for Crate & Barrel.

Balancing machine learning with human expertise

While machine learning can handle many aspects of search optimization, Crate & Barrel understood the continued importance of human merchandising expertise. As Peter Curran, former General Manager of Digital Commerce at Lucidworks, aptly put it: “I wouldn’t get into a self-driving car that didn’t also have a steering wheel and brakes.”

Merchandisers ensure that machine learning makes not just smart decisions, but the right ones. While ML can add synonyms to make queries more effective or organize search results based on customer signals, there are times when human judgment is essential:

• Seasonal items need to be boosted during the appropriate time of year
• New collections require prominent positioning to showcase fresh inventory
• Specialized search terms used by interior designers need proper handling

Crate & Barrel’s history as a retail trendsetter—having invented the vignette display style where products are arranged as they might be in the home—reinforces the importance of deliberate, creative choices in the customer journey.

Rapid implementation, immediate results

Crate & Barrel set an ambitious timeline, aiming to implement the new search solution on its website in just three months. Through meticulous planning, appropriate resource allocation, and regular check-ins with Lucidworks, the team met this aggressive goal.

On launch day, with both teams fully engaged, issues were addressed immediately, resulting in a smooth transition. The impact was immediate.

Remember the magnet board? The once-frustrated shopper now receives highly relevant results when searching for the same term. Similarly, searches for specialized terms like “bouclé” (a fabric woven of looped yarn) now return precisely matching products rather than unrelated items like velvet furniture.

New features enhancing the customer journey

The implementation introduced several key improvements to Crate & Barrel’s site search:

• Machine learning processing of customer signals allows the site to suggest relevant products that adapt based on changing trends and customer behavior
• Typeahead recommendations suggest specific products, enabling shoppers to add items to their cart faster
• Query recommendations suggest similar search terms that might bring up different product collections, facilitating discovery
• A reliable foundation built on Google Cloud’s stable, secure infrastructure

Measurable business impact

Since implementing Lucidworks on Google Cloud, Crate & Barrel has seen significant improvements in key performance indicators.

“We’ve noticed a higher conversion rate. There’s an increase in add to carts and order value as we are continuing to serve up more relevant items to our customers.” — Aaron Veit, Director of Digital Product Management, Crate & Barrel

Looking ahead, Crate & Barrel plans to enhance its omnichannel shopping features using Lucidworks’ e-commerce capabilities. This is particularly important amid supply chain uncertainties, as it allows the company to provide shoppers with real-time information about inventory availability—whether for online purchase, in-store pickup, or delivery.

By partnering with Lucidworks and Google Cloud, Crate & Barrel has successfully restored the delight to its customers’ search and discovery journeys, all while implementing the solution in just three months. The improved search experience now properly reflects the high-quality, curated experience that has made Crate & Barrel a trusted name in home furnishings for decades.

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Through advanced machine learning and intelligent merchandising tools, Crate & Barrel transformed its online search experience from a frustration point to a conversion driver, proving that in digital retail, the path to purchase begins with discoverable products.