Meet Crocs

Global leader in innovative casual footwear Crocs’ shoes may offer a comfortable cushioned step, but the company’s dominance in the footwear market is anything but soft.

From its humble roots in developing a now iconic foam-clog boat shoe, the Colorado-based company has grown into an international powerhouse with operations spanning the globe and multiple brands, offering everything from sandals to sneakers to winter boots with personalization offerings.

Today, Crocs offers a diverse range of styles for men, women and children sporting distinct collections and colors to match any occasion and every season. Delivering comfort, innovation and fun to the feet of the world is harder than it looks, and the company strives to create a smooth, consistent and effortless shopping experience for its millions of customers.

Challenge: Stepping Up Search at a Global Scale

Helping such a diverse set of customers across dozens of regions and many SKUs find exactly what they’re looking for requires search that’s relevant, fast and frictionless, so customers don’t say “see you later” before they’ve even begun.

Sporting two brands, a large, fast-moving catalog, regional sites and several merchandising teams to manage them, keeping in step with modern shopping behavior was no small feat. Inconsistent relevance and limited transparency made surfacing the right products at the right time a significant challenge.

The lack of transparency Crocs had in the AI logic used by their existing solution made it unclear why results showed up the way they did, creating  difficulty determining whether it was actually helping. 

“What we had in place required significant manual effort to meet our goals,” says Feliz Papich. “Because of our catalog’s size and diversity, doing a lot of individual merchandising is not feasible.”

“We knew we could do more with search to improve relevance and the overall customer experience, but to get there, we needed a solution that could handle the scale of our catalog and scope of our operations.”

Solution: A Global Search Upgrade with Zero Holes

A previous evaluation of Algolia by HEYDUDE gave the Crocs team familiarity with the solution, its flexibility, scalability, performance and AI vision. Impressed with recent improvements in Merchandising Studio, they reached out to Algolia.

”Algolia’s business user-friendly Merchandising Studio was a key advantage, giving regional merchandising teams greater visibility, control and the ability to easily configure the online shopping experience.,” Feliz says.

Crocs deployed Algolia for search, browse and autocomplete across its two brands and more than a dozen regions and sites worldwide. The team also implemented Dynamic Re-ranking (DRR) to improve relevance based on customer behavior.

Crocs initially planned to implement Algolia for Search alone but quickly expanded the scope to include Browse as part of the launch. Operating on an aggressive three-month timeline for a global rollout, and with a need for consistency across regions, Crocs worked closely with Algolia’s Professional Services team (Customer Solutions, Business Strategy, and Integrations).

During implementation, Algolia supported Crocs across data migration, relevance tuning and merchandising readiness. Training was delivered to ensure merchandising teams across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific were fully equipped to use Algolia and Merchandising Studio. 

Because of this strong cross-functional partnership and the results achieved at launch, Crocs was well positioned to expand its use of Algolia and explore more advanced capabilities over time.

Results: From Immediate Gains to Advanced AI Adoption

Within just 30 days of go-live, Crocs saw global impact from its new Algolia-powered search and discovery experience, delivering gains in key markets.

Conversion improvements were consistent across experiences. InstantSearch drove notable uplifts, with gains of 33%, 42%, and 79% in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, respectively. Browse also played a critical role, with conversions in Korea increasing by more than 175%, while markets including Germany and Australia saw strong improvements in core Search conversion rates, ranging from the low 20s to the mid-40s.

At the same time, performance improvements significantly enhanced the user experience. Crocs achieved an 81% reduction in PLP response times, enabling faster, smoother shopping journeys that directly contributed to higher engagement and conversion rates.

Building on these strong early results, Crocs moved into an optimization phase to further enhance performance. As part of this next phase, the team implemented Dynamic Re-Ranking (DRR) to continuously refine relevance based on user behavior while reducing manual merchandising effort at scale.

The move drove measurable improvements across key metrics, impacting both the conversion funnel and, ultimately, revenue for Crocs and HEYDUDE brands. A/B testing showed the U.S. Crocs market, the company’s highest-traffic site, experienced:

• +2.4% in click‑through rate (CTR)

• +5.6% improvement in average click position

• +2.3% in add‑to‑cart rate

• +3.8% in purchase rate

Building on these strong results and its close partnership with Algolia’s teams, Crocs quickly standardized on Algolia across all regions and merchandising teams and subsequently upgraded to Algolia’s Elevate plan to unlock more advanced capabilities. With Elevate, the team now has access to advanced capabilities, including NeuralSearch, AI Collections, Smart Groups and real-time personalization, which they are actively exploring to further optimize product discovery, automate merchandising and deliver more tailored customer experiences at scale.