Case Study: Gymshark increases search conversions to 10%+ and grows search revenue 400% with Algolia

How Gymshark Used Headless Commerce and Algolia to Transform Their Website & Increase Revenue

Gymshark, the U.K. fitness apparel brand that scaled from a startup to a billion-dollar company, faced a critical ecommerce challenge after its Magento store crashed on Black Friday 2015. Rapid growth exposed weak product discovery and search — poor relevance that surfaced out-of-stock items, low conversion from search, no personalization, heavy manual merchandising, and localization and scalability issues during peak traffic.

Gymshark rebuilt on headless commerce (Shopify, React, Contentful, AWS) and adopted Algolia for search, personalization, AI merchandising, and relevance tuning, deploying changes rapidly and rolling out personalization in a quarter. The results were dramatic: search conversion rose from 6.2% to over 10%, search usage increased (~20% and over 30% on Black Friday 2020), revenue from search users grew 400% year‑over‑year, AI merchandising and improved PLPs generated millions in incremental sales (est. £2M–£4.5M), and overall incremental annual revenue is estimated at $20M, with a scalable platform that handles peak concurrency reliably.

Gymshark

Ben Pusey

Software Product Owner