Leroy Merlin is a global construction retail juggernaut, providing professionals and homeowners across Europe, Asia, Africa and South America with a wide range of building materials, gardening, décor and home improvement products.

The more than 100-year-old French company has been in Brazil since 1996, supplying customers with everything from cement, flooring and drywall to household furniture and kitchen appliances, as well as the services to assist their renovations or repairs. Today, Leroy Merlin Brasil has more than 55 brick-and-mortar stores distributed across 14 Brazilian states and its federal district, all committed to its human-first strategy that recognizes people are the heart of any business.

The company believes value comes from building long-lasting relationships with customers, suppliers, stakeholders and its more than 10,000 local employees. For its customers, that relationship is, of course, based Leroy Merlin helping their DIY and construction projects to succeed.

The challenge

Limited scale due to inflexibility and slow performance

As a primarily direct-to-consumer retailer, Leroy Merlin customers have very specific needs, demanding a powerful search engine with strong product recommendations and accurate in-store availability. Unfortunately, the complexity of the company’s original Elasticsearch search engine made that a constant challenge.

Even simple changes to search were difficult, requiring the company’s tech team and involving significant coding, says Wagner Pereira, Search Specialist at Leroy Merlin. The company needed a search platform with which business teams could quickly and easily make changes to meet market demands and improve time to value.

The existing search platform lacked flexibility, making it difficult for Leroy Merlin’s lean tech team to maintain, scale and support the company’s omnichannel operations. It also didn’t have the performance needed to effectively support the company’s more than 1.3 million diverse products across multiple complex categories, resulting in slow performance and irrelevant search results.

The company knew it needed a search solution that offered the performance, flexibility and ease of use for business users to create a consistent search experience across its channels.

The solution

Laying the groundwork for a better search experience

The company turned to Algolia due to its blazingly fast speed and relevant search results, rich feature set with advanced capabilities and its intuitive dashboard for business users. Algolia provided the team with a highly scalable, low-maintenance solution that can be easily used by both its technical and business teams.

The heavily data-driven company performed a proof-of-concept (POC) of Algolia, leveraging its strong reporting capabilities to easily present the clear value the platform provides to the business. The company engaged in a pre-annual buy (PAB) with Algolia to validate performance before committing to a full-year contract.

With the aid of the Algolia customer success and engineering team, Leroy Merlin implemented Algolia Search, Query Suggestions, and Dynamic Re-ranking on its desktop and mobile search bars. Despite having a significant amount of legacy code, this initial migration took only about three months, with another month for customizations.

“We are finally able to quickly work and see changes fast, and we don’t have to bring in the entire team to make changes,” Pereira says. “Thanks to Algolia, we can now make changes instantly and know if we’re benefiting from them. For example, we can modify rankings and instantly see the impact on our key KPIs like CTR (click-through rate) and CVR (conversions).”

“By eliminating the need for developers to debug and manually analyze search result rankings — a recurring challenge with the previous search engine — Algolia allowed the team to focus on other higher-value initiatives that drive measurable business impact.”

As Hata explains, the impact goes even further. The ability for business and merchandising teams to refine and optimize search independently ensures that results stay continuously aligned with Leroy Merlin’s commercial strategy and omnichannel vision — a fundamental need for a company that operates across digital and physical touchpoints. At the same time, this autonomy significantly reduces operational costs, since maintaining a high-performing search experience no longer requires a large technical staff dedicated to ongoing maintenance and debugging.

Gabriel and Pereira’s team uses A/B Testing regularly to optimize search for customers, refine rankings across platforms and improve its impact on the business. Armed with evidence of Algolia’s business value, especially to non-technical users, Hata and Pereira says the company has moved all category pages to Algolia. 

It has also adopted several of Algolia’s advanced AI features, including Data Transformations — which it is used to create custom ranking attributes based on multiple weights and signals. Given the complexity of its products resulting in more long-tail keyword searches, the company is investigating using Algolia’s NeuralSearch for a deeper understanding of natural language and context.

“Most of our customers know exactly what they are searching for, and our search must help them find it quickly and accurately”, Pereira says.

The results

Building business value with powerful search performance

Today, Algolia powers search and navigation across desktop, mobile and in-app customer experiences, supporting the company’s omnichannel presence. 

Perhaps most critical, thanks to the simplicity of the Algolia dashboard, business teams can better manage and align search with the company’s product strategy.

Beyond revolutionizing Leroy Merlin’s e-commerce search engine, Algolia’s API-first architecture allowed the company to integrate product data with other systems far more easily than before, enabling product discovery across multiple contexts beyond the site and app.

More importantly, Algolia’s advanced indexing and data transformation capabilities empower the company to enrich the search journey itself — connecting products with complementary installation and renovation services, a business line that has grown consistently year over year. This integration makes search not just a tool for navigation, but a channel for inspiration and service discovery.

“And when we think about ‘users,’ we must also consider our in-store associates, who rely on search every day to assist customers on the shop floor. In that sense, Algolia’s impact will soon extend beyond digital touchpoints, supporting both online and physical experiences within Leroy Merlin’s broader omnichannel ecosystem”, Hata says.

Due to the enhanced customer experience from its improved search speed and relevance, Leroy Merlin’s Brazilian team has experienced impressive, measurable results, including:

• A 11pp improvement in click-through rates

• An increase of 1pp in the add-to-cart rate from search

• An estimated annual revenue increase of more than $28 million

Importantly, the company is using Algolia to live up to its human-first credo, using features like Dynamic Re-ranking and AI-based Data Transformation to craft a customer journey that builds long-term loyalty. “What I like is that we know by using ranking to provide more relevant results that the conversion we achieve is a deep conversion.”

They say that they intend to continually improve ranking and optimize search, and to use AI features to personalize product discovery and strengthen merchandising to better meet business objectives.

“We want to use Algolia to keep getting better and create an experience that’s deeper. This is just the start!”