Gémo is a French retailer offering affordable fashion for the whole family, both online and in more than 400 stores throughout France and abroad. 

Based in Montrevault-sur-Èvre, France, the company was founded in 1991 by the Éram Group as an affordable price retail chain. Named for its founder — Gérard Biotteau, and his wife, Simone — the retailer has expanded in both geography and channels, opening 35 stores outside France, building a strong ecommerce presence, and employing more than 3600 people. Today, Gémo also boasts a strong and growing omnichannel presence.

In recent years, the company has transformed its operations to meet growing consumer demand for omnichannel and sustainable shopping. It has modernized its logistics, strengthened its commitment to responsible products and the circular economy, and embraced its “Taillé pour la vie de famille” (tailored for family life) mantra: a dedication to making family life easier.
 

The Challenge

Outgrowing a Limited Search Experience 

In 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic had accelerated the need for seamless digital commerce, elevating ecommerce’s strategic role to the business. After a migration to the Planet ecommerce platform built on Proximis, the digital team heavily reassessed its broader technology stack.

Optimizing customer satisfaction with a better online shopping experience became vital to the company’s omnichannel growth, but the search engine native to its ecommerce platform proved to be too basic. It lacked customization and the ability to surface and fine-tune the most relevant results, leading to missed opportunities to improve the customer experience.

“It was really limited,” says Elsa Souillart, Category Manager at Gémo. “We couldn’t highlight categories, brands, or suggestions. On the back-end, we had almost nothing.” 

“We could get extracts of searches if we requested a specific period, but we weren’t autonomous. On top of that, we had very little capability to manage the platform or the online experience.”

The replatforming drove the company to re-evaluate its tools and the positive impact an upgrade to search could have on its business. 

“We realized that there was real potential,” Elsa says.“We could implement something so much broader than what we had before.”

The Solution

Turning Search into a Data-Driven Growth Engine

To support its growing digital ambitions, Gémo looked for a more advanced search solution that could provide greater control, flexibility, and visibility. Following an RFP process, the company selected Algolia because of its easy-to-use and easy-to-implement search and discovery solutions

The implementation of Algolia was fast and smooth, delivered in partnership with Clever AgeIt gave the business teams the data visibility and control it lacked to operate autonomously, and unlocked advanced, easy-to-configure capabilities. 

It was a step change for the company’s digital merchandising. 

The platform is easy to manage and requires minimal ongoing maintenance, allowing teams to focus on higher-value initiatives. Category managers can more strategically surface categories and brands with Merchandising Rules while using Analytics to continuously refine the search relevance. All without relying on technical resources.

With Dynamic Re-ranking, Gémo can automatically prioritize the most relevant products based on user behavior, helping improve relevance at scale, especially across their very large product catalog. “Given the size of our catalog, managing this manually isn’t feasible. Dynamic Re-ranking allows us to automate it at scale.” Elsa says.

At the same time, AI Synonyms, one of Elsa’s favorite features, help reduce no-results queries, ensuring customers can find what they’re looking for even when search terms vary, minimizing frustration. “It’s still something we’re continuing to explore, but when it fits the use case, we clearly see strong performance and real impact.”

Looking ahead, Gémo is implementing Query Categorization and exploring more advanced search and personalization capabilities. They are also looking into developing a more conversational experience powered by agentic AI, likely by 2027, in parallel with the company’s other AI initiatives across the tech stack, such as automating product page creation.

The Results

Transformative Uplift in Conversions, Revenue and ROI

Since its implementation, Algolia has delivered outstanding results: overcoming Gémo’s challenges around data control and autonomy, and, with the adoption of advanced features such as Dynamic Re-ranking, strengthening the visibility of best-selling products and adapting to seasonality.

“Algolia is at the heart of our digital strategy, and our investment has proven very profitable,” Souillart says. “Around one-third of web revenue passes through Algolia, and we know that conversions are twice as high when users go through search.”

Since activating Dynamic Re-ranking in particular, the company has seen even greater improvements, with conversions increasing by a factor of 2.3. 

Thanks to such measurable results, ROI has been clear and demonstrable. The digital team has been able to easily prove its search and discovery optimization has paid off in spades. Gémo independently validated a remarkable ROI of 160 times its investment.

The Gémo team intends to build on the strength and value of its Algolia-powered search experience. By 2026, the goal is to reach a 3.5 percent conversion rate increase and continue reducing the no-results rate as much as possible. Gémo is confident these objectives can be achieved with Algolia, supported by upcoming projects around Query Categorization, personalization, and, longer term, AI-powered capabilities.