Based in Curitiba, Brazil, online retailer MadeiraMadeira provides a wide range of home décor and improvement products to consumers in Brazil.

While its origins are rooted in one of the oldest materials, the company sold exclusively wood floors and ceilings when it started in 2009, its technology ambitions are anything but simple. Its distinctive name, meaning “WoodWood,” is inspired by the co-founders’ father, who would reassure customers his flooring wasn’t synthetic by saying, “It’s wood wood.”

Today, MadeiraMadeira offers more than 2M high-quality products, helping customers find everything they need to decorate, renovate or furnish their homes and offices at the click of a button. One of Brazil’s first e-commerce furniture stores, the company’s digital-first strategy has been a strong differentiator. 

“Our company culture is dynamic, innovative and customer-centric, with a strong focus on leveraging technology to enhance the shopping experience,” says Luiz Vernizze, Product Manager at MadeiraMadeira.

The Challenge

Nailing down search experience that makes the grade

Although it now boasts more than 50 stores and over 2,000 employees, the bulk of the company’s business happens online, where it blends elements of a marketplace and a direct-to-consumer ecommerce platform.

In addition to a wide selection, MadeiraMadeira prides itself in offering personalized recommendations to help customers make the perfect choices for their home furnishing or renovations, making search and discovery essential.  

It’s all a bid to achieve its mission of providing access to home improvement through technology and innovation. With that in mind, the company explored solutions that would improve search and discovery, leading to a smoother, happier customer journey  and ultimately stronger brand affinity, revenue and loyalty.

The Solution

Refurbishing search and discovery with relevance and speed

In 2019, MadeiraMadeira ran a two-month proof-of-concept with Algolia. The company’s working group quickly learned that the solution met and exceeded their goals, signing on for a two-year contract.

By this time, MadeiraMadeira had already gone live with Algolia Search across search bars and category pages on the company’s website and mobile app. In addition, the company uses Algolia for navigation, autocomplete, and carousels on product pages.

With an eye on flexibility and control around tailoring results, MadeiraMadeira has also deployed advanced Algolia features such as Dynamic Re-ranking, Query Categorization and A/B Testing.

“We use Algolia primarily to power our site search and product discovery,” Vernizze says. “The platform helps us deliver fast and relevant search results, which significantly improves the customer experience and boosts conversion rates.”

He suggests Algolia is vital to the company’s pursuit of performance-driven growth fueled by sustained innovation.

“Algolia plays a strategic role in enhancing our site performance and customer satisfaction while also empowering teams across the organization with data-driven insights and reliable technology.”

Recently, the company used Dynamic Re-ranking to further improve relevance by tailoring search results to user behavior allowing it to deliver more targeted, intuitive experiences around popular items. It is currently exploring the use of Algolia Recommend, planning an A/B test of the feature in late 2025. 

The Results

Search innovation that drives revenue and growth

With the company’s strong digital focus, it’s little surprise MadeiraMadeira is highly data-driven and focused on testing. Algolia’s collaboration is helping its lean, agile team stay true to this culture.

The solution lets MadeiraMadeira’s merchandising team accelerate time to value through faster iteration and flexibility. Using the Algolia dashboard, merchandising can now easily make changes, set up their own strategies and immediately see their impact through live updates.

A/B testing is a core cultural practice of the company, which continuously experiments with new custom ranking and re-ranking models to validate impact. For example, A/B tests new and smarter custom ranking scores which proved to be a huge improvement over its previous method.

Testing of Dynamic Re-ranking has shown similarly impressive impact, Vernizze notes: “A/B testing has demonstrated the value of Dynamic Re-ranking, we experimented with it on and off and saw a major decrease in click-through rates (CTR) and conversions (CVR) — and a huge drop in sales — for the period it was off,” he says.

He says Algolia has been a true partner as the company’s definition of success has changed from growth and operational efficiency to delivering exceptional customer experiences with blazing speed, precision accuracy and deep personalization.

“Algolia has been essential to us in overcoming our challenges. It provides a fast and flexible search solution that adapts to our growing needs, helping us stay competitive and maintain our incredibly high standard of customer satisfaction.”