Case Study: Birchbox achieves a 10% increase in revenue per session with Algolia

Birchbox increased its revenue per session by 10%

Birchbox, a subscription beauty retailer with over a million subscribers, relied on search to drive 35% of its e-commerce revenue but found its legacy open‑source search platform costly to maintain and inadequate for delivering relevant results or enabling data‑driven optimization. Keeping engineers focused on a non‑core capability drained resources and blocked product teams from running experiments to improve discovery.

Birchbox implemented Algolia’s search‑as‑a‑service (with Analytics, A/B testing, and Query Rules) in three months, enabling product managers and analysts to run tests and tune ranking without heavy engineering involvement. The change boosted relevancy and business metrics — revenue per session +10%, average order value +10%, and shop conversion +8% — while reducing maintenance overhead and paving the way for further search enhancements.

Birchbox

Yuri Broze

VP of Engineering