Caleres Updates Manual Rules with AI-Driven Search

↑21% YoY Revenue
600,000+ Product SKUs
13 Websites

Caleres shows passion through optimized experience

Caleres’ 140-year legacy is able to meet the changing demands of today’s digital customer by trading in manual indexing and recommendation rules with a self-optimizing technology stack from Coveo. They launched 13 sites in 18 months with enhanced product search and discovery, filtering, and ranking capabilities. Customers wanting to Buy Online, Pick Up In Store (BOPIS) now have the assurance that the results they see are relevant to their preferences and will be in-stock at their preferred location.

Caleres, (which means “passion” in Latin), is a St. Louis-based clothing and shoe brand responsible for successful brands like Famous Footwear, Dr. Scholl’s Shoes, Naturalizer, and Zodiac. It has 13 distinctly branded online retail sites and over 900 brick-and-mortar store locations.

With over 600,000 product SKUs to track and manage, Caleres migrated its ecommerce properties to Coveo’s AI-powered search and experience platform to ensure perfect product discovery that meets customer needs. These innovative solutions, made better by machine learning, allow Caleres to focus on storytelling and the creative upgrades that delight their target audience. Product marketing offers better returns across their web properties.

ML-powered site search

Problem: Manual search rules for over 600,000 products kept marketers from doing more meaningful projects.

Solution: Caleres tested Coveo’s fully AI-powered filters against the traditional search rules requiring manual fine-tuning. Coveo’s filters, enhanced by machine learning models that helped them improve over time, resulted in a better search product discovery process and conversion rate than legacy methods.

↑25%

search conversion rate

Dynamic product facets

Problem: Maintaining a relevant facet library for so many products was difficult, and the same facets were shown on every page.

Solution: With Coveo’s custom pipelines, each brand site has the ability to manage its own facets on a category or product page level, which is then fine-tuned with the assistance of machine learning. Businesses can own their own site experience and let ML create dynamic recommendations based on real-time data to match user needs.

30-50%

visitors engaging with facets

conversion rate for facet users vs. nonusers

Delivering a personalized,
immersive experience

With the volume of orders and visits to their sites, Caleres could see substantial returns on their use of machine learning to create a more functional and relevant shopping journey. The Coveo engine supports continuous product discovery through the search box, product category pages, recommendations throughout the site, and how products are ranked and sorted. Because the platform runs on AI and ML, marketing tactics update automatically to match current best practices.

Coveo fit nicely into that philosophy of focusing on the customer and with their AI, relevance, and personalization, we can create smooth and impressive website experiences that feel easy and natural.

Dan Cornwell

Director of Ecommerce and Digital Experience

Take a look inside

How Caleres uses Coveo to reduce manual intervention and focus on site functionality. (Page 4)
How upgraded facets empower customers to find the right product in seconds. (Page 6)
How machine learning and product analytics boosted visits and order sizes. (Page 7)