+27.5%

Increase in Add-to-Cart Rate, Search

+23.9%

Increase in Click-Through Rate, Search

Industry:Fashion & Accessories

Business Unit:E-commerce

Use Case:Descriptive Discovery & Variant Presentation

Channel:Website

Key Objectives:Enhance Product Relevance, Improve Variant Presentation

Products:

HandbagsAccessoriesLicensed Collections

How Dooney & Bourke Increased Search Add-to-Cart Rate by 27.5% with Marqo

Company Overview

Dooney & Bourke is an iconic American leather goods brand known for timeless handbags, premium materials, and a commitment to craftsmanship that has defined the company since 1975. The brand has built a distinctive product portfolio around rich Italian leathers, signature collections, classic silhouettes, and carefully crafted handbags and accessories. Its ecommerce assortment gives customers multiple ways to discover products across silhouettes, materials, colors, sizes, hardware, and signature styles. With shoppers ranging from customers seeking a specific collection to those exploring by style, material, or occasion, intuitive ecommerce search and product discovery are essential to connecting Dooney & Bourke's product craftsmanship with a high quality digital shopping experience.

Why Dooney & Bourke Evaluated Marqo

Dooney & Bourke shoppers navigate handbags and accessories through nuanced combinations of silhouette, material, collection, color, and license, often expressing practical needs in natural language and describing capacity or occasion rather than naming a style.

Dooney & Bourke needed product discovery that could interpret descriptive language, present colorways and materials clearly within a single silhouette, and turn nuanced preference into a faster path to purchase.

Challenges

Luxury handbag retailers face a distinct discovery problem: shoppers describe bags by material, silhouette, color, and occasion rather than by product name. Dooney & Bourke's previous search platform struggled with descriptive and combined-language queries, returning no results for phrases expressing practical needs and for queries entered in Spanish, while licensed collection searches returned more results than the collection contained. Variant presentation compounded the problem, since displaying multiple colorways for a single silhouette required workarounds and response times lagged at the moment of discovery. Shoppers arriving with clear preferences were not reliably reaching the products that matched them.

Solution

Marqo's pixel was installed to capture shopper interaction signals, including search queries, clicks, add-to-cart events, purchases, and broader browsing behavior. This data enabled Marqo to understand how customers searched for and evaluated products across Dooney & Bourke's catalog, including patterns tied to collection, silhouette, color, and material.

Marqo ingested these signals alongside Dooney & Bourke's catalog data to train a model tailored to its product taxonomy and brand language. As new collections and licensed collaborations launched, Marqo continuously updated rankings based on real onsite engagement, reducing the need for ongoing manual rule tuning and merchandising maintenance.

Dooney & Bourke deployed Marqo through a controlled production A/B test across both search and collection browsing, and reported improved performance on every measured metric.

Enhanced semantic intent understanding: Dooney & Bourke reported improved interpretation of descriptive and combined-language queries, including requests expressed as practical needs rather than product names.
Variant-aware presentation: Clearer handling of colorways and materials within a single silhouette, so alternatives surfaced without crowding the result set.
Catalog-aware relevance: Stronger alignment between results and attributes such as collection, silhouette, color, and material.
Reduced operational overhead: Reduced reliance on manual overrides as rankings improved through learning from anonymized onsite behavior.

Results

Dooney & Bourke evaluated Marqo through a live A/B test on its Shopify storefront over a two-week period, running Marqo against its incumbent search provider across both search and collection browsing. Every measured metric improved on both surfaces.

Overall Business Impact

+27.5%

Increase in Add-to-Cart Rate, Search

+23.9%

Increase in Click-Through Rate, Search

What This Means

Interpreting the descriptive language customers naturally use, and presenting variants clearly, closed the gap between a shopper's preference and the product that matched it.

Moving Forward

Dooney & Bourke runs Marqo across both search and collection browsing, supporting discovery across its signature collections and licensed collaborations.

Results reflect Dooney & Bourke's experience during the measured period and may vary based on implementation, seasonality, traffic composition, and other business factors. Reported outcomes are Dooney & Bourke's measurements and do not constitute a guarantee of future performance. Metrics were collected using Dooney & Bourke's onsite tracking and Marqo's analytics framework. Marqo processes only anonymized behavioral signals and does not collect personally identifiable information. Marqo™ is a trademark of Marqo Inc. Dooney & Bourke is a registered trademark of Dooney & Bourke, Inc. All other trademarks belong to their respective owners.