Founded in 1883 by Italian immigrant Salvatore "Sam" Lucchese, Lucchese Bootmaker stands as a symbol of enduring American craftsmanship, blending tradition with contemporary style to offer products that epitomize the spirit of the West.
Intro & Challenge
- When Lucchese Bootmaker entered 2025 with the goal of “Make it Smart”, the strategy was clear: elevate the shopping experience at every point in their online store.
- Lucchese’s leading indicators were all up (more traffic, better load time, etc.). But conversion rates were down. While there were many potential root causes of this challenge, Lucchese decided to start with the Search experience on the site to see if improving search could meaningfully move the needle on conversion rates and make the overall experience “smarter”.
- Traditional keyword-based search doesn’t always yield meaningful results, and Lucchese had to spend time updating their product descriptions to ensure that when a user typed a specific query, the right products were getting picked up by their search engine.
We want to do more for our customer while leveraging tech. We run a very lean team so we're always looking for partners that have the tech to fill in gaps, especially with things like Search where we knew there was a lot of low-hanging fruit.
- Lourdes Servin, Sr. Director, Digital & E-commerce
Lucchese turned to Nobi to see if our AI Search capabilities could improve the accuracy of search results and drive up conversions.
In the first two months after launching, Nobi was able to drive a 21% improvement in conversion rates compared to the standard shopping experience in an A/B test. By month 3, Nobi had generated an incremental $148,000 in revenue, a 74% improvement over the standard Shopify experience, at an ROI of 33x.
Always Show Results
Sometimes online shoppers enter queries that don’t have a relevant match. Rather than show no results, Nobi always finds the closest matching products in the belief that showing something is better than nothing.
For the example below, a query of "Terlingua" in Lucchese’s default search experience yields No Results:
But this same search query on Nobi shows several results, including the Walter which the shopper ultimately added to cart:
Nobi is able to use our own knowledge base to determine what the word Terlingua means and predict some products that may closely match the look and feel that this shopper was aiming for.
Better rankings
Standard search algorithms rank based purely on keyword match. But Nobi leverages Retrieval Augmented Generation, or RAG, to go beyond keyword-based matches to create a more robust process for finding relevancy.
For the query Olive, Lucchese’s standard search engine shows results. But the Dante boot in Olive Chocolate isn’t shown in the first 16 results. The user would have to “Load More”:
This same search on Nobi shows results as well, but the Dante Olive Chocolate is on the second row so the user easily sees it without having to “load more” results. This led them to add this product to cart and purchase it.
RAG has empowered Nobi to show results that are ranked as closely as possible to what the user typed in, thereby showing the shopper the product they wanted.
Semantic search
If a shopper types something into Lucchese’s standard Shopify search engine that doesn’t match the keywords of the products in Lucchese’s database, they won’t see those products. But this means that shoppers need to use the terms you would have used to describe your products in order to see them as results.
For the query card holder, a shopper only sees two tote bags that Lucchese sells that have a cardholder built into them (and therefore have a keyword match):
But Nobi is able to use semantic search which can find close matches to the query even if there are no relevant keywords on the product pages. For this query, Nobi responds to the user that no products exactly match the query but that there are other products that are similar, including credit card cases, envelope card cases, and bifold wallets.
For the example above, the user added a wallet in Ostrich Cognac to cart and bought that product. Nobi’s semantic search capability saved a potential sale from leaving the site because they thought Lucchese didn’t carry the product they were looking for.
It's been really great to understand how people are typing and interacting with an agent and understand how people are looking for our popular categories. It's also a treat to work with a partner who is just as excited to learn and dive deep so it's been great working with the Nobi team.
- Lourdes Servin, Sr. Director, Digital & E-commerce
Key Takeaways
- Nobi’s default to always showing results, even if the search query doesn’t closely match anything that Lucchese holds as product, can still lead to sales
- Nobi’s semantic search capabilities mean that results are now shown with better rankings and even when no keywords from the product description match what the user has typed in
- Additionally, by incorporating certain elements like a “Quick Add to Cart” feature, Nobi has been able to drive up conversion rates through the funnel, leading to increased sales.
Conclusion
Lucchese's partnership with Nobi has transformed their shopping experience, leading to increased customer engagement, higher ROI, and overall business growth. In the future, Lucchese and Nobi will explore ways to further leverage AI in the shopping experience to help Lucchese fulfill its goal of “Make it Smart” for 2025.
If you want to learn and be inspired, you should look to implement a tool like Nobi. We've seen great incremental results, where conversion rates have been significantly higher through Nobi than on our binary search. But I think the biggest reason a brand should implement a tool like this is that you have the opportunity to apply more information towards optimizing broader campaigns and your broader brand and e-comm goals."
- Lourdes Servin, Sr. Director, Digital & E-commerce
