The challenge

Lacoste is a global clothing company founded in 1933 by tennis players René Lacoste and André Gillier. It sells clothing, footwear, eyewear, leather goods, perfume and watches in a network of 120 countries, 1200 shops and 10600 wholesale points of sale. Moreover, Lacoste operates 11 online shops. 

To build on the standard of excellence signified by the green crocodile logo, Lacoste started a global project around their online merchandising strategy. Since search is a top priority for Lacoste, this meant integrating merchandising into the search experience. Some of the goals included a review of user paths (which product to which user and when), a move from a search results page to a modern InstantSearch experience, providing areas of recommendation, and more. 

Most importantly, the challenge was exceeding speed and relevance standards of users whose expectations are set by players like Google and Amazon. The Solr-based search engine Lacoste was using provided basic speed and relevance functionality, but did not meet new performance standards Lacoste set for themselves. In addition, Lacoste wanted a solution that is developer-friendly but also easily usable by business stakeholders.

The solution

Algolia met Lacoste’s challenge of providing direct, as-you-type feedback from the search box with results in under 50 miliseconds. This high standard in speed is met globally, thanks to Algolia’s unique Distributed Search Network across 16 regions, covering Lacoste’s 11 key online markets. This means that search queries can be automatically directed to the closest data center, and that network latency is drastically reduced. 

Recognizing that relevance is a challenging technological and UX problem, Lacoste was impressed with Algolia’s solution that provides both powerful results and removes the “black box” e!ect by allowing business stakeholders to understand and control relevance. With features like typo-tolerance, synonyms, word separators and optional words, Lacoste provided users with an ultra-functional search, reducing bounce rates by 88%. 

One of the key results Lacoste achieved with Algolia is an increase in conversion rates, powered by the ability to implement business logic within search. For example, Lacoste is able to apply custom rankings, showing recommendations for their best sellers or items in stock that they’d like to promote. Features like Query Rules and personalization enable Lacoste’s business team to influence ranking behavior of the engine for specific queries, rapidly adjusting to user intent and boosting conversions. 

Last but not the least, Algolia’s uniquely powerful crossplatform presence means that Lacoste’s users can search and buy on mobile just as easily as on desktop, boosting mobile conversion rates by 62%. 

Lacoste’s migration to Algolia was complemented by partners. Altima - Accenture led the development and maintenance of the application, supported by Telios, whilst Early Birds provided an extended layer of site personalization.

The result

With Algolia, Lacoste is able to provide an exceptional online experience to their customers, while giving its developers a reliable, scalable tool, and business teams a solution they can optimize to continually improve business results. Algolia’s team of experts and network partners is an additional benefit, ensuring Lacoste has support at every step of their journey.