+16.5%

Increase in Revenue per User, Search

+14.35%

Increase in Click-Through Rate, Collections

Industry:Crafts & Hobbies

Business Unit:E-commerce

Use Case:Attribute-Driven Product Discovery

Channel:Website

Key Objectives:Enhance Product Relevance, Increase Average Order Value

Products:

FabricPrecutsPatternsNotionsKits

How Missouri Star Quilt Co Increased Search Revenue per User by 16.5% with Marqo

Company Overview

Missouri Star Quilt Company is one of the most influential names in quilting and a leading ecommerce destination for quilting fabric, precuts, patterns, kits, notions, and supplies. The family owned company has built a global community around ecommerce, education, and one of the largest quilting tutorial channels on YouTube. Its extensive online assortment spans fabrics, colors, patterns, designers, collections, tools, and project types, creating a uniquely visual and inspiration driven shopping journey. Because quilters often search using creative descriptions, designer names, color palettes, materials, and project ideas, intuitive ecommerce search and product discovery are essential to connecting inspiration with the right products.

Why Missouri Star Quilt Co Evaluated Marqo

Missouri Star's shoppers frequently begin with an idea rather than an exact SKU. They search by color family, designer, fabric collection, print scale, and precut format, often describing a project rather than a product, while the catalog turns over continuously as new lines arrive and collections sell through.

Missouri Star needed product discovery that could interpret creative and descriptive language, keep relevance aligned with available inventory, and connect inspiration to the fabrics and formats most likely to convert.

Challenges

Craft and fabric retailers face an attribute-driven discovery problem, because customers shop by color family, designer, and collection rather than by product name. Descriptive queries did not always surface the fabrics and formats that matched what a quilter had in mind, and the catalog's constant turnover compounded the problem as new lines arrived and collections sold through. That gap risked leaving highly relevant products undiscovered inside a large and visually rich assortment, at the exact moment a quilter was assembling a project and building a basket.

Solution

Marqo's pixel was installed to capture shopper interaction signals, including search queries, clicks, add-to-cart events, purchases, and broader browsing behavior. This data enabled Marqo to understand how quilters searched for and evaluated products across Missouri Star's catalog, including patterns tied to color family, designer, collection, and precut format.

Marqo ingested these signals alongside Missouri Star's catalog data to train a model tailored to its product taxonomy and the language quilters use to describe projects. As new fabric lines arrived and collections sold through, Marqo continuously updated rankings based on real onsite engagement, reducing the need for ongoing manual rule tuning and merchandising maintenance.

Missouri Star deployed Marqo through a controlled production A/B test across both search and collection browsing, and reported statistically significant improvements across every measured engagement metric.

Descriptive intent understanding: Missouri Star reported improved interpretation of project-driven and color-driven language, reducing inconsistent results and null queries.
Attribute-aware relevance: Stronger alignment between results and attributes such as designer, collection, color family, and precut format.
Adaptive ranking: Rankings continuously adjusted as new fabric lines arrived and collections sold through, keeping relevance aligned with available inventory.
Reduced operational overhead: Reduced reliance on manual merchandising as the catalog turned over.

Results

Missouri Star evaluated Marqo through a controlled two-week A/B test on its Shopify storefront, running Marqo against its incumbent search and browse experience across live traffic. Every engagement metric improved, with all results statistically significant at p<0.001.

Overall Business Impact

+16.5%

Increase in Revenue per User, Search

+14.35%

Increase in Click-Through Rate, Collections

What This Means

Connecting descriptive, project-driven language to the right fabrics and formats turned inspiration into complete baskets rather than abandoned searches. Search is the highest-converting surface on the site, with shoppers who search adding to cart at nearly twice the rate of those browsing collections, and Marqo shoppers searched meaningfully more often than the control group.

Moving Forward

Missouri Star runs Marqo across both search and collection browsing, supporting discovery as new fabric lines arrive and collections turn over.

Results reflect Missouri Star Quilt Company's experience during the measured period and may vary based on implementation, seasonality, traffic composition, and other business factors. Reported outcomes are Missouri Star's measurements and do not constitute a guarantee of future performance. Metrics were collected using Missouri Star's onsite tracking and Marqo's analytics framework. Marqo processes only anonymized behavioral signals and does not collect personally identifiable information. Marqo™ is a trademark of Marqo Inc. Missouri Star Quilt Company is a registered trademark of Missouri Star Quilt Company. All other trademarks belong to their respective owners.