Case Study: Bonobos achieves significant lifts in search, browse, and recommendation revenue and conversions with Constructor.io

Bonobos Rapidly Transforms Product Search & Discovery Experience with Minimal Engineering Costs

Bonobos, the archetype of the DNVB focused on online apparel, faced a product discovery problem: their in-house Elasticsearch solution struggled with long-tail queries, lacked personalization, required separate maintenance for autocomplete and recommendations, and couldn’t automatically optimize results for business KPIs. With limited engineering bandwidth and a tight holiday deadline, Bonobos evaluated Constructor and entered Constructor’s Proof Schedule (Beacon + product feed) to validate a faster, more personalized search, browse, and recommendations experience.

Constructor delivered a rapid integration—installing a Beacon, ingesting Bonobos’s product feed, and pairing daily with Bonobos’ engineers via a shared Slack channel—to deploy ML-backed, personalized search, browse, and recommendation experiences in time for Black Friday. Constructor’s solution produced clear business impact: +9% lift in search revenue, +6% lift in browse conversions, +92% lift in recommendation conversions, and +22% lift in recommendations AOV.

Bonobos

Britt Ballard

Senior Director of Engineering