Headquartered on Vancouver’s North Shore in British Columbia, Arc'teryx is a Canadian outdoor apparel and equipment company known for high-performance alpine gear.

The company was founded in 1989 by climbers Dave Lane and Jeremy Guard, who believed the best way to build the right mountain gear was to create a company in the mountains — namely, British Columbia’s wild, wet and unpredictable Coast Mountains.

While the company has expanded to include satellite offices in Portland, Munich and Tokyo, it maintains on-site design and manufacturing facilities and rigorously tests its gear in real alpine conditions.

Named after Archaeopteryx, the oldest known bird, Arc'teryx focuses on radical innovations that bring an evolutionary leap in technology and liberate its customers from environmental constraints. 

The Challenge

Supporting a growing DTC business

In 2019, the company began investigating search engine tools to support its fast-growing direct-to-consumer strategy. With no advanced search tool in place, Arc'teryx needed a scalable and reliable solution that enhanced both revenue and customer experiences.

Its parent company, Amer Sports, selected Algolia Search, along with Rules, Dynamic Re-ranking and AI Synonyms features,  as a best-in-breed solution to meet those needs.

Jessica Ashton, Director of Global Digital Merchandising and Campaigns at Arc'teryx, says, “We were shifting from a wholesale model to a DTC experience. Algolia’s seamless integration with our product feeds and site experience was a key deciding factor in its selection.”

Over just four to five months in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Arc'teryx went from having no advanced search technology to offering a high-performance product discovery experience with Algolia — moving from limited in-house tools to a fully integrated solution with advanced AI-powered search and discovery features.

While Algolia was deployed across Amer Sports’ enterprise portfolio, the Arc'teryx digital merchandising team — led by Ryan Dyson, the company’s Digital Merchandising Specialist — quickly embraced it to support the brand’s goals.

The solution

An agile, personalized customer journey to the peak

Arc’teryx deployed Algolia across its product listing pages, campaign experiences and as part of a broader product discovery journey. To support its merchandising efforts and more effectively tailor discovery for its site’s visitors, it has implemented a host of Algolia features and capabilities.

“Algolia has been super helpful in terms of getting real-time insights into how guests are searching through our site and related queries that would better support merchandising and product discovery,” Dyson says. The feature has been essential in ensuring customers find the right gear, even though terminology can vary widely.

With Algolia in place, the Arc’teryx team can now implement merchandising strategies that align with monthly goals as well as implement stronger analytics to understand how visitors engage with the brand at a country and language level.

“We had shifted from a twice-a-year, seasonal approach to more agile monthly launches focused on what the customer needs at a specific point in time for their outdoor activities,” Ashton explains. “Algolia helps us to better support our customers by helping them find the right category at the right time.”

The company worked closely with Algolia to adopt its new search solution, benefiting from regular meetings and strategic checkpoints throughout the implementation.  Arc’teryx is now transitioning to a company-level Algolia deployment to achieve greater personalization and A/B test its merchandising strategies.

The results

Driving revenue through greater search relevance

Today, Arc'teryx leverages Algolia to create a sleek, intuitive discovery experience—eliminating the frustration of empty search results and elevating relevant key products at essential times, beyond just seasonal drops. 

“The control we have over rules setting around an event like Black Friday or, for us, Cyber Week has been extremely useful,” Dyson notes. “Within our search experience, we provide suggested links that promote popular products or searches, as well as categories.” 

“This has been really helpful in how we can not only curate but monitor search terms at the time to ensure relevant products are being promoted around the time of campaigns and promotions — and then relying on Dynamic Re-ranking to support product discovery without manual merchandising effort.”

Algolia has been a vital partner to the Arc’teryx team, not just during its implementation but also throughout a recent shift in merchandising focus to become more agile and during a recent replatforming.

In fact, search is the go-to when solving problems around product launches, for example, if a product goes missing. “We use Algolia as our source of truth because of its consistency around how it supports our product feed and discovery on our site,” Ashton says.

Dyson praises the solution’s ease of use. “When onboarding or bringing people into Algolia, it’s just super-straightforward. All the functions and features are easy to navigate, which goes a long way to making it feel seamless.”