Hobbycraft Boosts AOV and RPV With Bloomreach’s Conditional Slot Merchandising 

Hobbycraft is the United Kingdom’s leading arts and crafts retailer, offering everything from paint and paper to yarn, baking, and jewelry-making supplies. With more than 27,000 SKUs across dozens of creative categories, the brand inspires makers of all kinds, whether they’re painting their first canvas or perfecting a handmade gift.

Hobbycraft

Products

+ 21
%
Avg. Order Value
in the "paint" category
+ 7.3
%
Revenue Per Visitor
in the "paint" category
+ 6.4
%
Avg. Order Value
in the "stickers" category

Challenge

As the UK’s leading arts and crafts retailer, Hobbycraft serves a passionate and highly diverse customer base, from casual DIY enthusiasts to professional creators. With a catalog exceeding 27,000 SKUs across painting, baking, knitting, and countless other creative categories, the company’s approach to ecommerce needed to reflect the same inspiration and variety as its stores.

As Hobbycraft expanded its online presence and doubled down on digital growth, it recognized that its existing search and merchandising setup wasn’t keeping pace with evolving shopper expectations. In particular, the brand faced several obstacles to delivering an artful product discovery experience:

  • Limited scalability with a rule-based setup. The brand’s previous solution relied on rigid, rule-based configurations that demanded perfectly structured and enriched product data. With tens of thousands of SKUs, even small data inconsistencies led to broken results and unpredictable customer journeys.
  • Unreliable search experience across large, varied assortments. Broad searches like “paint” or “stickers” often surfaced an unbalanced mix of products — such as kids’ kits alongside professional supplies — without any logical hierarchy or category intent. This made it difficult for customers to find what they needed quickly and confidently.
  • Manual, high-effort merchandising processes. Traditional tactics like pinning or boosting offered limited control and required constant updates, especially when products went out of stock or campaign priorities shifted. Hobbycraft wanted to empower its merchandisers to guide the experience where it mattered most — ensuring curated variety in top search positions — while letting AI handle the rest. 

Solution

When Hobbycraft adopted Bloomreach, the focus was clear: improve the intelligence, efficiency, and flexibility of its search and merchandising experience. Bloomreach’s GenAI-powered search delivered immediate impact through more relevant autosuggests, adaptive filters and facets, and natural language understanding for longer, more conversational queries.

Using AWS to deliver fast, personalized retail experiences with high availability and scalability during peak traffic, Hobbycraft’s team  rapidly innovated its approach while confidently meeting constantly shifting consumer expectations through services like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon OpenSearch.

Here’s how the Bloomreach platform helped:

  • Conditional slot merchandising for precise control. While Bloomreach’s GenAI ensures top-performing, relevant products rise to the surface, conditional slot merchandising gives merchandisers direct influence over which types of products appear in specific grid slots. Instead of using static pins or complex rule stacks, Hobbycraft set dynamic slot conditions based on attributes like brand, craft type, or availability.
  • Category-level optimization that reflects shopper intent. In the paint” category, Hobbycraft ensured the top product slots represented a mix of oil, watercolor, and acrylic paints for more variety and balance. For “stickers,” the team diversified the grid to include kids’ designs, scrapbooking embellishments, and crafting accents, helping every shopper find something relevant to their needs.
  • Automation that adapts in real time. If a featured product sells out, Bloomreach’s Loomi AI automatically replaces it with the next best-performing option, maintaining both continuity and quality of experience. This automation eliminated Hobbycraft’s former workflow of manual cleanup previously required after every change.
  • Scalable merchandising through logic, not labor. By defining logic-based slot conditions, Hobbycraft drastically reduced manual maintenance while still ensuring creative control. The team also used A/B test slot rules, ran seasonal campaigns, and executed brand visibility initiatives faster, without compromising search relevance.

How It Worked

  1. Iterative testing across high-variation categories. Hobbycraft first piloted conditional slot merchandising in categories with the greatest diversity of customer intent, such as “paint” and “stickers.” These tests allowed the team to fine-tune slot rules and measure their effect on engagement and conversion.
  2. Blending AI intelligence with human curation. Bloomreach’s GenAI-driven search continuously learned from user behavior, while the merchandising team defined key rules that reflect business strategy. This hybrid model delivered a curated yet dynamic experience that balanced automation with brand control.
  3. Streamlined workflows and creative flexibility. Conditional slot merchandising transformed how the team approached optimization, replacing hours of manual product pinning with data-backed, rule-based decisions. Merchandisers now experiment more freely to build experiences that are both efficient and inspired.
  4. Scalable deployment across categories. After early success, Hobbycraft expanded conditional slot merchandising into other multi-variation categories, like embroidery and paper crafts. In doing so, the brand revealed a scalable framework that supports both everyday merchandising and strategic promo execution.
Painting with paintbrushes and paint with materials from craft store

Conditional Slot Merchandising gave us the advantages of both pinning and boosting without the downsides of constant maintenance. We could be intentional about the types of products we wanted to show in certain slots based on our current strategy.

Alex Jardine, Senior Online Merchandiser at Hobbycraft

Alex Jardine

Senior Online Merchandiser at Hobbycraft

Results

The introduction of conditional slot merchandising delivered measurable improvements in Hobbycraft’s commercial performance: 

  • 21% boost in average order value (AOV) in the “paint” category
  • 7.3% lift in revenue per visitor (RPV) in the “paint” category
  • 6.4% increase in AOV in the “stickers” category

Hobbycraft has built a search and merchandising strategy that’s more intentional, scalable, and reflective of its brand identity. By combining AI-driven automation with human creativity, the retailer can adapt faster to seasonal trends, shift inventory as needed, and meet demand more efficiently while maintaining the personal, inspiring experience its customers love.

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Hobbycraft’s partnership with Bloomreach proves that creativity scales when powered by AI. Learn how AI-driven merchandising can help your brand grow smarter, faster, and more efficiently. Take the three-minute tour of Bloomreach.

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