Introduction 

Blacks Outdoor which owns the British outdoor retailers Blacks and Millets is the largest outdoor retailer in the UK.  It entered administration in 2012 and was purchased by JD Sports.  In the rescue process of the outdoor retailers, JD Sports hired new management and teams, relocated headquarters, improved stock and brought the brands’ e-commerce technologies up to date.

This case study describes how both Blacks and Millets dramatically increased their online sales by implementing Barilliance personalised product recommendations.

The Challenge

The teams at Millets and Blacks were looking for a solution geared towards personalising the customer experience, in order to drive conversion rates.  At the same time the marketing teams were looking for an effective, easy to implement solution that would enable them to execute campaigns on a regular basis without the constant need of IT support.

The Solution

The Millets e-commerce team was the first to implement the Barilliance personalized product recommendations engine, mainly because it offers enterprise-class functionality that is intuitive for marketers to use. Implementation of the recommendation engine was very quick. Soon after a successful implementation of the Barilliance solution on the millets.co.uk site, the solution was also implemented on blacks.co.uk

How Does it Work

The Barilliance recommendations engine understands the preferences and intent of each visitor and shows the most relevant recommendation type and products in real time. Over 20 types of product recommendations are automatically presented to site visitors on category pages, product pages and basket pages.  Parallel to the auto-generated product recommendations, the teams at Millets and Blacks constantly create upsell and cross sell campaigns that override the auto recommendations generated by the recommendations engine.