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

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.