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

Story Behind the Brand

Hobbycraft is the United Kingdom’s leading arts and crafts superstore retail chain. The brand carries everything from painting supplies to products for knitting, baking, and jewelry making.

As one of the first retailers to partner with Bloomreach on Conditional Slot Merchandising, Hobbycraft helped shape a feature that augments GenAI-powered search results by giving merchandisers control over specific slots in the product grid. By setting rules based on product attributes — like brand or category — the merchandising team curated highly relevant results to support brand visibility and competitive separation while enhancing the customer experience at scale.

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

Challenge

As Hobbycraft worked to double down on its ecommerce strategy, the brand came up against several challenges in delivering a seamless search and merchandising experience. Prior to Bloomreach, Hobbycraft leveraged a rule-based solution that relied heavily on perfectly structured and enriched product data — something that was difficult to scale or even maintain. With 27,000+ SKUs spanning dozens of arts and crafting verticals, even small gaps in data could break the experience, which made the on-site search bar inconsistent and unreliable.

A query like “paint” might return oil sets, watercolors, and kids’ kits all in one product grid without any logic behind the order or mix of products. Similarly, “stickers” surfaced only children’s products, completely overlooking other subcategories like scrapbooking supplies. Due to these issues, Hobbycraft sought to better support shoppers in navigating to the most relevant options for their specific project.

Overall, traditional merchandising tactics, like pinning products or boosting by attributes, offered some control but also came with major trade-offs, including constant manual updates and challenges with out-of-stock items. The workarounds to these issues were resource-intensive and difficult to scale, particularly for a small team responsible for a large catalog. Hobbycraft needed a next-generation AI search and merchandising tool to help manage the experience by exception, without sacrificing relevance or performance. This would allow them to showcase their full product assortment, accommodate different types of shoppers, and reduce the burden of constant manual updates.

Solution

When the team first adopted Bloomreach, they were intensely focused on improving the core functionality of their search and merchandising approach. Bloomreach’s GenAI-powered autonomous search solution delivered an immediate improvement: autosuggest guided shoppers more effectively, filters and facets adapted in real time, and longer, more conversational search queries were met with the most relevant results. With GenAI doing the heavy lifting for search, the merchandising team could stop fixing broken results and move from reactive maintenance to optimization — this laid the groundwork for deeper experimentation, which eventually led their innovative team to pilot Bloomreach’s Conditional Slot Merchandising.

While the Bloomreach GenAI core always shows the most relevant, top-performing products, Conditional Slot Merchandising gave Hobbycraft the flexibility to control which types of products appeared in key positions on the results page. Rather than rely on static pinning or an inordinate number of rules that impacted the grid, the team could define conditions for specific slots using product attributes (e.g., craft type or availability) to curate a specific customer experience.

In the “paint” category, for example, they ensured top slots represented a mix of oil, watercolor, and acrylic products, instead of letting one subcategory dominate. For “stickers,” they alternated between kids’ designs, paper craft embellishments, and more to reflect the full range of customer interests. If a product goes out of stock, Bloomreach’s AI automatically fills the slot with the next best-performing product, handling the backend work so the team can focus on strategy. Ultimately, this allowed for better execution of business strategy through the guaranteed visibility of certain products.

With that framework in place, Hobbycraft began expanding its use of Conditional Slot Merchandising across other high-variation categories (e.g., embroidery) where customers would benefit from seeing a mix of kits, tools, and accessories. What once required hours of hands-on adjustments could now be maintained with logic-based slot definitions, allowing Hobbycraft’s merchandisers to think more creatively about their assortment. Because conditional slot rules could be A/B tested in advance, they could support both strategic initiatives and seasonal campaigns, helping them approach product discovery like a customizable canvas.

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

Results

To put Conditional Slot Merchandising into action, Hobbycraft began testing it in categories where customer intent can wildly vary. In the “stickers” category, for example, the team reconfigured the product grid to variations of stickers to ensure audiences saw products relevant to their needs. This thoughtful restructuring led to a 5.3% lift in revenue per visitor (RPV) and a 6.4% increase in average order value (AOV).

Across other broad terms like “paint,” Hobbycraft used Conditional Slot Merchandising as a form of audience segmentation. By surfacing a curated mix of product types near the top of the search results, the team drove stronger engagement across their diverse shopper base. The result was a 7.3% lift in RPV and a 21% increase in AOV, demonstrating that giving customers the right entry point into the assortment has a measurable impact on conversions and cart size.

Beyond the numbers, the feature has allowed Hobbycraft to implement a more intentional, scalable approach to search and merchandising — one that reflects the diversity of its catalog and customer base. Instead of making trade-offs between automation and control, the company now has a system that supports both. With Bloomreach’s feature now baked into the team’s day-to-day merchandising workflows, Hobbycraft can respond faster to seasonal shifts, campaign priorities, and customer trends, making the ecommerce experience as dynamic and creative as the customers they serve.