Since 1825, Clarks has provided iconic footwear to the U.K. and, ultimately, the world.

Founded by brothers Cyrus and James Clark, C. & J. Clark International Ltd. has both seen and been at the forefront of changing fashions and trends as a widely popular shoe manufacturer and retailer. The company's inspiration came when James Clark had a stroke of brilliance while working at his brother’s tannery in Street, Somerset, and created the company’s first sheepskin slippers, known as Brown Petersburgs.

The company has continued to be headquartered in its original High Street location, even as it has expanded operations worldwide. Clarks expanded to Ireland in the 1820s, Canada in the 1830s, and Australia in the 1850s. 

Today, it’s the world’s largest casual and smart shoe company, with a strong presence in the U.K., North America, Europe, India, and China. In every market, the original vision of the Clark brothers — minimizing waste and maximizing ingenuity — continues to drive the company’s core values of innovation, conscientiousness, and craftsmanship.

In addition to its extensive number of stores and franchise locations, Clarks boasts an impressive international e-commerce presence through global websites that cater to various regions in which it operates such as Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Europe and China.

The challenge

Moving from a monolithic architecture

In 2022, the Clarks digital product delivery team had a major decision to make. The company’s existing e-commerce platform, SAP Hybris, was reaching the end of its extended lifecycle, and its on-premises hosting was becoming unsustainable.

“We had to make a change. We had to remove ourselves from that whole monolith,” says Meriel Neighbour, Global Head of Digital Product Delivery & Transformation at Clarks. “That architecture made it extremely difficult to make changes and updates, be flexible and scalable, and it was set in that on-premises approach of yesteryear. We needed to modernize.”

This meant moving to the cloud, adopting flexible technologies, and implementing a headless commerce approach. Through in-depth research into cloud-based solutions to replace SAP Hybris, the Clarks team evaluated the MACH Alliance. This proved helpful in identifying cloud solutions that seamlessly integrated and supported the extensibility the company needed. As well, the MACH Alliance narrowed the selection pool by recognizing solutions that met its rigorous API-based, headless, and cloud-native design standards.

After reviewing several options for search and discovery, and undergoing a demonstration, the company selected Algolia. The Clarks team was able to confidently adopt the new search solution, knowing it was validated by the MACH Alliance to integrate well with its other chosen products, and would align with its new modern, scalable practices.

“We still had to evaluate and demo Algolia to double-check that what the MACH Alliance said was true was true. But we were happy to see it addressed everything we did with Hybris and would play well with the other suite of products we were going to implement — including POS. So, we just engaged and started the project.”

The solution

AI-driven search and recommendations

Clarks adopted Algolia Search and a range of features, including Dynamic Re-ranking and Recommend. 

The implementation took place between June and September 2023. During this time Clarks collaborated closely with Algolia and its systems integrator partner, GridDynamics, to ensure a seamless process and launch. A dedicated Algolia business transformation team helped guarantee a thorough understanding of products and familiarize the Clarks team with the available training resources.

In addition to adopting Algolia as a robust search and recommendation engine, Clarks’ re-platforming included moving to Commercetools as a core e-commerce platform. Amplience and Akeneo were selected to handle imagery, product descriptions and pricing. Collectively, along with Algolia, Neighbour calls these MACH Alliance recommended solutions the Three Amigos as a nod to how seamlessly they work together.

Algolia was selected in part due to its advanced features and capabilities, especially AI-driven search and recommendations, Neighbour says. 

“Algolia allowed us to catapult ahead and start using AI in terms of a recommendation engine,” she says.” It has the capability to learn from what people are browsing and make sure that it surfaces to the next customer with similar browsing behaviors, constantly learning and becoming more expert in its recommendations.”

“It’s part of our first tentative foray into the AI world,” she says, adding that Algolia AI capabilities provide Clarks with a sophisticated way to understand and respond to customer behavior.

Importantly, Algolia is well-equipped to manage the extensive scale and complexity of the Clarks catalog, which includes a wide variety of product variations, such as different colors, sizes, and styles. While the catalog contains thousands of individual products, the variations significantly increase the overall product range. Additionally, product availability can vary across different regions.

Other Algolia capabilities represented a huge leap forward for Clarks as well. Whereas customers previously had to type out full searches, the company is taking advantage of the solution’s autocomplete functionality. This has made searching for the company’s footwear more intuitive and efficient, greatly improving the customer experience.

“The user experience with Algolia is just that much better,” Neighbour says. “Everyone's already exhausted with whatever they're doing. If the search bar can help them, that’s a win.”

The result

Enhanced CX and optimized search

Thanks to Algolia, customers have been able to find products much more easily, Neighbour says. “Historically, you might be an adult, for example, but served up children’s shoes, which obviously isn’t very helpful.”

She says that with Algolia's machine learning capabilities, the search and browsing experience has improved dramatically and further with every customer visit through testing. 

In addition to learning from customer behavior to surface relevant products, Neighbour praises Algolia’s ability to support its product merchandising.

“We have the ability to chop and change around product ordering, so we can promote the products we want to sell first, or those that make the best margin, or which we have the biggest stock of — we can position those and entice the customer to purchase those items above others.”

One of the biggest benefits has been time savings on the backend, particularly thanks to Dynamic Re-ranking. While the Clarks team used to spend hours on merchandising pages, they can now let DDR do the work for them.

Clarks now provides customers with a fully integrated omni-channel commerce experience, of which Algolia is a vital component. Processes like refunds and restocking have become seamlessly integrated between channels, enhancing customer experience but also reducing operational costs and delays. Clarks’ improved search and recommendation capabilities has also led to fewer returns, reducing costs, and increasing profits.

As the company eyes future opportunities, it maintains a close relationship with Algolia. Neighbour sees Algolia as a strategic partner and intends to strength the business relationship, helping ensure Algolia’s product roadmap continues to align with Clarks’ goals.

“Algolia is definitely a strategic partner and the right partner to grow with us as the platform grows and we strengthen the  e-commerce side of its business alongside our popular brick-and-mortar stores.”