Bloomreach Serves Up Smarter Searchandising for Sur La Table

Story Behind the Brand

Sur La Table offers an extensive range of private label and third-party products, from cookware and cutlery to small electrics and glassware. Not only has the brand been dedicated to providing high-quality kitchenware for every home chef’s needs, but Sur La Table also goes beyond its extensive product offerings with cooking classes and culinary-based events hosted by professional chefs on staff.

As a standalone brand, Sur La Table wanted to keep evolving and innovating its business, taking the experiential piece of the company and extending it into the digital space. However, the ecommerce search and merchandising tool that the brand utilized was too manual and required consistent human intervention. Because of the recommendation of VP and GM, Ecommerce, Rachel Frederick, who had previously worked with Bloomreach, the Sur La Table team quickly saw the transformational power of switching to Bloomreach‘s GenAI product discovery solution.

11.5

boost in category AOV

7.6

increase in search average order value (AOV)

6.6

lift in search add-to-cart (ATC) rate

Challenge

Sur La Table wanted to upgrade its product discovery solution to one that was tightly integrated with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, yet the brand wanted to be strategic about the move — it hoped to avoid getting overwhelmed by numerous point solutions that were difficult to piece together.

Already recognizing the challenge customers faced in finding exactly what they were looking for, Sur La Table knew that it could proactively tackle this issue by implementing a site search experience that understands how real people shop. Instead of relying on rigid, keyword-based search rules, the team sought a more conversational and intent-driven approach.

Additionally, the team wanted to take this initiative a step further by offering AI-powered product recommendations that could dynamically evolve with shopper behavior. Having used out-of-the-box recommendations from their previous solution, the ecommerce team quickly discovered that these recommendations were expensive, disconnected from the rest of their tech stack, and not adaptive to customer intent.

Even worse, they couldn’t piece together where certain recommendations were coming from, leading to wasted time manually adjusting product rankings. This strategic switch to a new tool would be the driving force behind Sur La Table’s new autonomous search strategy, eliminating tedious workflows while increasing impact.

Solution

As Sur La Table’s new VP and GM, Ecommerce, Rachel Frederick knew of the perfect solution to overcome its product discovery and merchandising obstacles: Bloomreach. A veteran of the ecommerce industry, Frederick had already experienced success using this powerful tool and knew of its ability to elevate product discovery beyond the site search bar to boost visibility, average order value (AOV), and revenue per visitor (RPV) across search and category pages.

Her team started with search and merchandising in Bloomreach Discovery to address the low-hanging fruit with Loomi AI — the GenAI core powering Bloomreach’s autonomous search capabilities. Instead of requiring constant manual adjustments, the AI worked in the background to refine search relevance, surface the right products, and reduce the need for merchandising intervention. Thanks to the massive dataset that Bloomreach has built over the last decade, the search engine knows how to adapt and optimize for customer behavior across multiple industries in ecommerce and beyond. As a result, Sur La Table didn’t have to wait for a pixel to learn — the company immediately saw an impact on search relevance and revenue.

The switch to Bloomreach also helped the team improve merchandising processes and free themselves from time-consuming and manual optimizations. Sur La Table also leveraged Bloomreach’s merchandiser suite to prepare for its seasonal promotions, create redirects for sale-related searches, and implement global facets to improve the site experience. Plus, the brand used collections reporting and has found it very helpful for tracking specific product and category collections to make its merchandising teams more effective instead of reactive.

Then, to help customers looking for recommendations to increase their basket size, Sur La Table added Bloomreach’s recommendations and pathways to build more tailored experiences for both purposeful shoppers and casual browsers. All in all, Bloomreach Discovery, embedded with its GenAI core, empowered Sur La Table to adapt the shopping journey based on customer intent and enhance both the searching and browsing experiences on its ecommerce website.

We’ve absolutely seen the value of Bloomreach. Onboarding and using new tools can feel like a burden, so it’s nice to hear from my team that it’s one of their favorite tools to use and the power it brings. It gives us the insights we need to read parts of our business. It’s just easy — it’s probably been one of my best decisions since I’ve been here.

Rachel Frederick

VP and GM, Ecommerce at Sur La Table

Results

After the initial implementation of Bloomreach, Sur La Table saw immediate improvements in search engagement. Thanks to Loomi AI, the team drove a 6.6% increase in search add-to-cart rate (ATC), a 7.6% boost in search AOV, and an 11.5% lift in category AOV. These gains illustrate how shifting to an autonomous search experience with additional merchandising abilities can improve shoppers’ interactions online and encourage higher value purchases.

Beyond the search bar, Sur La Table clocked 1.4 million visits to its “Similar Items” widget and another 1.6 million visits to its “You May Also Like” widget. By delivering more intuitive product suggestions at key decision points, the brand made it easier for customers to discover relevant items, which resulted in substantial revenue. This led Frederick to confess, “This is never a tool that comes up for discussion or debate on: ‘Do we want to move forward with it next year?’”

Even though improving the customer experience and driving results for the business was a major goal for Sur La Table’s ecommerce team, the positive sentiment internally is one of the many wins for Frederick. It demonstrates that Bloomreach’s benefits are double-sided: It equips practitioners to drive greater impact by solving search quality issues and also optimizes for people — not just products — to ensure shoppers can find exactly what they need.