Case Study: Michael Stars boosts revenue, conversion, and search performance with Athos Commerce

How Michael Stars partnered with Verbal+Visual and Athos Commerce to elevate design, AI search, and conversions sustainably

Michael Stars, a contemporary fashion brand and certified B-Corp, wanted its online store to better reflect its brand while handling growing traffic and a larger assortment. The company’s static search and filtering, limited merchandising control, and disconnected systems made it harder for shoppers to find products and led to lost sales through zero-result searches. It worked with Verbal+Visual and Athos Commerce on the Shopify Plus experience.

Athos Commerce provided AI-powered search, autocomplete, dynamic filtering, synonym recognition, and predictive search as part of a broader redesign and integration effort. The results included a 951% increase in revenue per visit, a 15% increase in average order value, and a 13% increase in conversion rate. Search users were 10.3x more valuable, zero-result searches dropped 35%, and search accounted for 26% of total revenue.

Michael Stars

Sudie Smith

Head of Digital