Burton Taps Into Loomi AI and Bloomreach Discovery for Conversion-Boosting Insights

Story Behind the Brand

Building on a legacy that began in 1977 with Jake Burton Carpenter’s vision, Burton is committed to delivering high-quality snowboarding gear, reducing environmental impact, and promoting fair labor practices — all while honoring its founder’s pioneering spirit. From transforming a backyard hobby into a global sport, the company remains at the forefront of innovation and sustainability and continues to take charge of making snowboarding accessible to all.

To further enhance its mission, Burton leverages Bloomreach Discovery to ensure a seamless, personalized shopping experience that resonates with both seasoned riders and newcomers alike.

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more revenue than visits for search

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more revenue than visits for categories

3.5

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higher conversion rate

Challenge

Driven by the need to enhance its product discovery strategy, the well-established brand needed to address several problems simultaneously. Marga Franklin, the Senior Manager of Global Digital Merchandising and Content at Burton, identified several key obstacles: irrelevant search results, limited control over merchandising tools, personalization, and a high dependence on IT.

From a search perspective, Burton lacked search features and algorithms that could return relevant results. Because of this, search optimization was too manual, leading the merchandising team to rely heavily on IT to change algorithms, synonyms, autosuggestions, and the look and feel of search and category pages. The biggest challenge here is that Burton is a global brand with over 33 different catalogs spread across regions, which made it impossible to tailor search globally for different localized languages and read analytics for quick insights.

At the same time, Burton’s merchandising team dealt with processes that had become too manual as the company continued to scale. A final key concern was the need for personalized experiences at the geographic level, particularly for specific rider segments like mountain riders, backcountry riders, or park riders. However, Burton struggled to deliver search results at the product page or category level tailored to these distinct customer types. All these roadblocks underscored the need for a more advanced AI-powered ecommerce search engine — a project championed by Franklin, who had previously experienced success with Bloomreach Discovery.

Solution

To optimize Burton’s approach to search, merchandising, and personalization, the brand bet on the AI beneath Bloomreach Discovery, Loomi AI. Fueled by Bloomreach’s customer data engine, Loomi AI powers ecommerce personalization to optimize search algorithms, which helps brands adapt to their customer’s needs in real time. Using a combination of natural language processing and machine learning for semantic understanding, Bloomreach’s search bar better understands context and intent to provide more relevant results than basic keyword matching, which Burton relied on with its previous solution.

Aside from search, Burton also tapped into AI to help with its merchandising efforts using the “Playbooks” dashboard. From finding optimizations and seasonal trends to accessing performance and evaluating category trees, these advanced analytics helped Burton’s merchandising team improve category navigation, cross-sell products in high-performing categories, find products to bundle and upsell, boost products on search results pages, identify trends in queries, and more. Building on these insights, Burton used the multi-view catalog feature to streamline merchandising across different regions, tailoring product assortments to meet local preferences. By unearthing the low-hanging fruit with AI’s help, Burton improved important metrics like revenue per visitor (RPV) and conversion rates.

A standout success involved the term “Step On,” a snowboard binding with an intuitive boot-to-binding connection designed for all-mountain performance. With three connection points — two at the toe and one at the heel — it offers snowboarders unmatched simplicity, security, and board control. This was one of Burton’s top-searched phrases that initially generated zero revenue. Leveraging Loomi AI’s sophisticated analytics, Burton identified search results were only showing non-discounted colorways, while customers were specifically searching for discounted styles. By adjusting the search algorithm to prioritize these discounted items, Burton saw an immediate increase in conversion rates. These enhancements further reaffirm the transformative impact of Loomi AI.

Relevance and personalization were major pain points for us. With Loomi AI at the core of Bloomreach Discovery, we gained the ability to quickly optimize site search experiences without the technical bottlenecks, allowing us to surface the right products to the right customers effortlessly.

Marga Franklin

Senior Manager, Global Digital Merchandising and Content at Burton

Results

The integration of Bloomreach Discovery, powered by Loomi AI, transformed Burton’s search and category performance across all regions, even during the downseason from February to July. Search contributed significantly to revenue, with a 10 percentage point (pp) higher contribution compared to its share of visits, demonstrating that search users were more likely to make purchases. The search conversion rate was also 3.5 pp higher than the overall site conversion rate, illustrating the effectiveness of tailored search experiences. Additionally, the RPV from search was 110% higher than the overall site RPV. All of these results highlighted the impact of AI-driven search personalization on customer spending.

Category performance also saw substantial improvements, with category pages contributing 21 pp more to revenue compared to their share of visits, indicating that category navigation enhancements led to a more engaged and purchase-ready audience. Overall, these results demonstrated how Bloomreach Discovery optimized Burton’s digital merchandising strategy to drive significant improvements in key performance metrics. By addressing previous limitations with advanced product discovery tools, Burton successfully enhanced its shopping experience, increased conversions, and maximized revenue opportunities across search and category interactions.