The challenge
Maisons du Monde is the European leader in accessible and inspiring home design. The brand brings together 7.5 million customers around desirable and sustainable lifestyles. Optimism, creativity, commitment, and closeness are at the core of its values, backed by a highly effective omnichannel model. Maisons du Monde’s purpose: “To inspire everyone to open up to the world, so that together we can create unique, warm, and sustainable living spaces.”
In 2022, Maisons du Monde also launched its Good is Beautiful brand movement, built around five commitments to firmly anchor sustainability in its strategy — ensuring that beauty always goes hand in hand with goodness.
We met with Marie Goutchkoff, E-Merchandiser at Maisons du Monde’s offices in Paris’ 8th arrondissement, to discuss the collaboration between Algolia and this renowned brand. Marie and her team focus on three main areas: operations, analysis, and projects. Data lies at the heart of the optimizations made by the e-merchandising team. They run numerous A/B tests and build their roadmap based on the insights collected. The e-merch team also works closely with other departments within MdM, including e-category managers, Data, UX, Product Owners, and international market managers.
As competition in e-commerce intensifies, having an efficient search engine has become a central issue. “Search has become a crucial lever, with a usage rate of 20%. It converts best and represents nearly 35–40% of online revenue,” says Marie. “We need powerful tools to control our results and implement brand strategies, especially since the launch of our marketplace, which has significantly expanded our product catalog.”
The solution
In this context, in 2019, MdM turned to Algolia to implement an e-merch console that would allow the company to optimize its results. The previous software lacked flexibility: “It was a technical tool without an e-merch console to optimize result relevance. Algolia brought us this much-needed business dimension for our search engine,” Marie explains. Thanks to improvements in both textual and business relevance — on results pages and in the suggestion layer — MdM has significantly enhanced the user experience and conversion rate.
The new features enable a unified strategy across product pages, despite them being managed by different tools. While Marie’s team (e-merch searchandising) is the primary user of Algolia’s console, the web development team at MdM also benefits, thanks to thorough documentation and development support from Algolia.
The Implementation Process
There was an extensive comparative testing period to assess what differentiated Algolia’s solution. Initially, it was compared against the previous tool with 50% of the French market. At first, performance indicators didn’t show clear benefits. Only after developing two similar UX experiences did the added value of Algolia become evident.
MdM then decided to roll out Algolia across 100% of the French market in August 2021, followed by the Spanish site in November 2021, and subsequently across all international markets between February and April 2022.
Throughout this rollout, Marie and the e-merch team benefited from Algolia’s guidance and optimization support. “We are supported by a CSM and an engineer who are responsive and attentive to our challenges, which is extremely valuable,” says Marie.
Strong Results
During deployment, A/B testing showed that product detail page views increased by 4% and conversion rates by 5%.
Among Algolia’s tools, MdM notably used the AI Re-ranking feature, which suggests the most attractive products directly on results pages. This module contributed to a 2.3% increase in click-through rate and a 1.6% increase in add-to-cart rate.
Overall, what MdM values most about Algolia is the support provided by its team, which contributes to continuous improvement processes, helps solve challenges, and advises on ways to further optimize search.
“We really value our collaboration with Algolia,” emphasizes Marie. “Attentive to our needs, the teams are eager to evolve the console (both technical and ergonomic aspects) to make our work easier and help us better deploy our commercial strategies on the results pages.”
