Overview

A multi-brand luxury retailer known for editorial-driven merchandising, exclusive designer collections, and rapid seasonal turnover needed a search experience that matched the sophistication of its shoppers. The legacy search system was hindering sales both for customers and internal teams.

Due to the legacy system, basic search queries like "black dress with straps" wouldn't surface results.

The Challenge

Despite a high-intent audience and curated inventory, their search experience was underperforming:

• Customers frequently hit dead ends on vague, descriptive queries

• New arrivals weren’t showing up in time for major drops

• Manual merchandising workflows created lag in discovery

• Search results lacked contextual relevance and brand cohesion

The Solution

Refine replaced the retailer’s keyword-based search with a fully tagless, AI-native discovery engine. Without any manual enrichment or metadata mapping, the platform:

• Delivered instant, visually and semantically relevant results for every query

• Surfaced new product drops automatically, without waiting for backend updates

• Handled ambiguous or subjective search terms with context-aware understanding

• Required minimal engineering time after initial implementation
  
  

After implementing Refine's models, relevant products were easily surfaced, no matter the query.

Results