Building Search that “Sees”

Wallpaper & home decor are visual — there’s just no way around it. And finding the right wallpaper can be a really trying task if the underlying search platform doesn’t understand what you mean, or understand visual context clues. Brewster believed that their search could be better if it understood intent, and could “see” inside images instead of just trying to match keywords in product titles & descriptions.It turns out they were absolutely right. Switching their underlying search platform to Objective led to a 6.84% increase in “Add to Cart” rate, a 10.84% increase in Checkout rate, and an overall 8.61% increase in conversion rate. Let’s dig in and see how they did it.

Wallpaper is Worth a Thousand Words

Brewster has been supplying a broad range of customers with wallpaper & home decor for 125 years, ranging from commercial buyers to designers, B2B retailers, and direct consumers. With a catalog of over 10,000 unique wallpaper patterns, Brewster scaled up to supplying one of the widest collections in the business.

But as they scaled, their legacy text-based search solution didn’t. They were stuck with some of the painful user experience problems that come with legacy search systems. Ryan Breau, Brewster’s E-Commerce Marketing Director recalled, “If I typed ‘birds’, I didn’t get anything with birds even though we have that in our catalog. Our search only looked at the title and description of each product.”

They were having the issue a lot of online retailers have — text-only search relies entirely on the product being thoroughly annotated with a title and description. And legacy keyword-matching solutions relied on matching exactly the words used in the description. If you searched for “birds”, you also want to see “parrots”. Unfortunately, with legacy search solutions your hopes for that subtly parrot-themed living room are probably dashed before you even start searching.

Difficult Search Creating Difficult Customer Support

If a search solution is difficult for end-users, it’s usually also difficult for the Customer Support teams that rely on it to field customer requests. Phone support had become particularly painful for the Brewster team, as customers often tried to describe a product they had seen but couldn’t recall the SKU or exact title of.As you would imagine, this resulted in frustrated callers, a frustrated support team, and long call durations.

Building an AI-Native Discovery Experience That “Sees”

Ryan and the Brewster team partnered with Objective to overhaul their whole search platform with Multimodal Search that is able to understand the “whole product” — unpacking the semantic meaning in title and description text. And, crucially for Brewster’s users — the ability to “see” inside the product photos and understanding the context of what the images represent. Shapes, colors, themes, and of course — birds, work right out of the box with Objective Search.

Unlocking New Possibilities in User Experience

After switching to their new AI-native search engine, the results speak for themselves. The team saw a 6.84% increase in users adding items to their cart, a 10.83% increase in Checkout rate, and an 8.61% increase in overall conversion rates. The change has transformed how they’re able to deliver customer happiness, and empowers Ryan’s team to focus their energy on making an impact on user experience, instead of wrestling with outdated search technology.

Ryan continued to make us blush: “We found an exceptional partner in Objective. Not only do they have great tech, but they also collaborated closely with us to ensure a smooth onboarding process.
”We can’t agree more, Ryan. 🙌

And the searches for birds? We’re happy to report that Brewster has thousands of yards of bird wallpaper, all of which you can find as fast as you can type “birds for my classy living room”.