N Brown Uses Bloomreach Discovery Across Brand Portfolio 

Story Behind the Brand

N Brown is a top 10 UK clothing and footwear digital retailer, with a home proposition. Headquartered in Manchester, England. N Brown designs, sources, and creates its own brand products and homeware offered through its retail brands, which include JD Williams, Simply Be and Jacamo.

N Brown prides itself on being a diverse retailer that has products that will fit the needs of an inclusive range of customers. This is seen in not only their distinct brands and the products offered, but the flexible payment options available to customers making purchases. 

59.73

increase in revenue per search user with Simply Be IRE trading site

20.16

increase in revenue per search user with brand Simply Be

6.34

increase in revenue per search user with brand Jacamo

Challenge

With nine brands and individual websites, N Brown is one of the most diverse retailers in the United Kingdom.

As it is for every online retailer, displaying relevant search results and category information is essential for N Brown. With a previous search provider, the N Brown online merchandising team was forced to publish a lot of rules to ensure its algorithm was as tailored as possible to those using it.

N Brown was looking for a solution that could help it be proactive rather than reactive in regards to market trends and help build the relationship between marketers and merchandisers internally. Enter Bloomreach Discovery.

Solution

N Brown chose to roll out Bloomreach Discovery — specifically Site Search & Merchandising  — one brand at a time to ensure it was giving the proper attention to important KPIs and targets.

As N Brown rolled out Bloomreach Discovery with more and more of its brands, N Brown built out its internal technical knowledge. The brand-by-brand implementation went from eight weeks down to four weeks and taking this flexible approach to implementation allowed N Brown to mitigate major risk in making a massive change to nine brands and websites at once.

Rather than spending time creating rules and making manual updates, N Brown’s brands are now powered by a commerce-specific AI engine with 12+ years of data. N Brown can now test relevancy and ranking rules to see which one has the best outcome for its business specifically rather than being a “one size fits all” company when it comes to product discovery.

N Brown is using Bloomreach’s A/B testing tool to test relevancy rankings and general sentiments around rankings. The testing ensures that N Brown has the most relevant products featured for customers to find. N Brown is also able to capture additional behaviors online that it could not prior to adopting Bloomreach Discovery.

Bloomreach has truly been a partner to us every step of the way. The technical knowledge and insight given to us by the Bloomreach team has been top notch. We really had the feeling that Bloomreach wanted this project to be as successful as we did here at N Brown. When all parties are geared up with the same goal in mind, this often leads to positive outcomes.

Darrell Clarke

Lead Product Manager, N Brown

Results

The results have been overwhelmingly positive for N Brown since implementing Bloomreach Discovery across its brand portfolio.

When considering an increase in revenue per search user, N Brown has made significant gains with these trading sites:

SB IRE — 59.73%
Simply Be — 20.16%
Jacamo — 6.34%

JD Williams — 4.45%
Marisota — 4.41%
Home Essentials — 1.68%

Additionally, Jacamo has seen an 8.89% increase in search user conversion rate since N Brown implemented Bloomreach while JD Williams has seen a 12.08% increase in search user conversion rate in that same timeframe.