Industry: Retail
Sideshow is a specialty manufacturer of high-end, museum-quality collectible figures and statues, including limited-edition pieces from iconic licenses like Star Wars, Marvel, DC, and more.
Founded in 1994, the brand has evolved from crafting toy prototypes to becoming a global leader in the collectibles space, serving a passionate community of film, television, and comic book fans.
Products
Sideshow caters to a dedicated and diverse audience of pop culture enthusiasts — from Pokémon collectors to The Lord of the Rings superfans and beyond. But with so many fandoms to reach and product categories available, engaging this audience meaningfully across multiple channels presented a unique challenge.
To keep fans coming back, Sideshow needed to go beyond broad messaging and one-size-fits-all experiences. It required a strategy that could recognize each customer’s specific interests and deliver tailored, cross-channel journeys that felt personal, timely, and relevant.
To achieve this, Sideshow needed to:
Sideshow found a comprehensive solution to meet its marketing and ecommerce goals with Bloomreach.
Using our autonomous search and marketing automation platforms, the brand can build data-driven customer experiences that take every shopper’s unique preferences into account — and evolve with each new interaction with the brand.
With Bloomreach Engagement, Sideshow unified its marketing efforts into a single platform and created real-time profiles for every shopper. These profiles reflect each customer’s unique relationship with the brand, from their favorite pop culture franchises to their preferred marketing channels and purchase behavior.
With this foundation of real-time data, Sideshow can plug personalized insights directly into its campaigns and automatically deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time. This has been a game-changer for the brand’s lean marketing team, allowing them to test quickly, personalize at scale, and expand customer journeys to include additional channels like SMS.
“Being able to intelligently build scenarios and workflows that cater to our particular audience makes a huge difference,” explained Chris Pirrotta, VP of Digital Experience at Sideshow. “We can understand our data and make the right decisions. Our campaigns can easily adapt while still being specific and intentional.”
At the same time, Sideshow leveraged Bloomreach Discovery to make sure its site experience is just as personalized as its marketing efforts. Powered by Bloomreach’s GenAI core, the brand’s search and product rankings can dynamically adjust in real time, using individual shopper behavior and broader site-wide trends to serve the best results.
This creates a site experience that accurately reflects each customer’s preferences and in-session activity, while also responding to emerging interests across the site. Every click, search, and product list is geared towards a customer’s needs, helping them find exactly what they’re looking for.
“Now, our search and discovery experience automatically adjusts in real time to our audience,” said Dennis Bower, Brand Manager at Sideshow. “If a new Superman movie comes out and more customers are searching for Superman products, Discovery will take notice and auto-boost those items in the search field — in the past, we would have to go in and boost it manually.”
“The automatic adjustments are incredible,” Pirrotta added. “Every single thing we would want to do happens proactively in the platform.”
We needed a platform that could unify all our customer data and intelligently personalize every touchpoint. A lot of platforms promise this, but Bloomreach stood out for its ability to process massive volumes of data and deliver insights instantly. Honestly, it feels like magic — no one else could match that speed or scale.
With Bloomreach Discovery and Engagement powering customer experiences, Sideshow has unlocked the efficiency and results it was looking for.
Automated workflows now save the Sideshow team an average of 30 hours a week, freeing them from repetitive tasks to focus on creative thinking and strategy.
Marketing campaigns have seen improvements across the board, including a 50% increase in SMS click-through rates, and on-site journeys are optimized to serve customer needs — search conversions have increased by 90% as collectors can more easily find the characters, franchises, and collectibles they care about.
To build on these AI-powered wins, Sideshow has also become an early adopter of Affinity, Bloomreach autonomous marketing solution — using agentic AI to build and launch self-optimizing campaigns at scale.
Learn more about Sideshow’s success with Bloomreach Affinity.
We know your time is valuable, so let’s cut to the chase.
This isn’t your typical sales demo; it’s a conversation designed to help you make an informed decision about Marketing Automation, Autonomous Marketing, Autonomous Search or Conversational Shopping. We’ll discuss your challenges, explore potential solutions, and see if Bloomreach aligns with your goals.
Schedule a Time to Connect
