+19.5%

Increase in Revenue per Collection User

+19.0%

Increase in Add-to-Cart Rate from Collections

Industry:Lifestyle & Home Goods

Business Unit:E-commerce

Use Case:Descriptive Product Discovery

Channel:Website

Key Objectives:Enhance Product Relevance, Streamline Shopper Experience

Products:

Household GoodsApparelFurnitureStationery

How MUJI Increased Revenue per Collection User by 19.5% with Marqo

Company Overview

MUJI is one of the world's most recognized Japanese lifestyle brands, known for its distinctive approach to simplicity, functional design, and everyday living. MUJI operates a global retail business with approximately 1,400 stores across 28 regions and a product assortment spanning clothing, household goods, food, furniture, and other everyday essentials. Its ecommerce experience brings thousands of products and multiple categories together under a remarkably consistent design philosophy. With shoppers discovering products across categories, use cases, materials, and subtle product attributes, intuitive ecommerce search and product discovery are essential to translating MUJI's distinctive retail experience into a seamless digital shopping journey.

Why MUJI Evaluated Marqo

MUJI's diverse catalog creates a fundamental search challenge. Because products are named functionally rather than commercially, customers search by material, dimension, room, and purpose, often describing what they need rather than naming it, and a single query can span categories that traditional taxonomies keep apart.

MUJI needed product discovery that could interpret descriptive intent, map it to the right product regardless of how the catalog is structured, and preserve the clarity customers expect from the brand.

Challenges

Retailers with functionally named catalogs face a discovery problem, because customers search by purpose, material, and dimension rather than by product name. Queries expressed as needs rather than nouns did not always surface the items that answered them, and cross-category discovery was constrained, since products serving similar purposes were separated by taxonomy rather than connected by use. Sustaining relevance required manual tuning that grew with the assortment, which meant customers searching in the way MUJI's own design philosophy encourages were not always reaching the products best suited to them.

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 customers searched for and evaluated products across MUJI's catalog, including patterns tied to material, dimension, and intended use rather than product name.

Marqo ingested these signals alongside MUJI's catalog data to train a model tailored to its product taxonomy and functional naming conventions. As seasonal assortments rotated and new categories expanded, Marqo continuously updated rankings based on real onsite engagement, reducing the need for ongoing manual rule tuning and merchandising maintenance.

MUJI deployed Marqo on its US storefront and measured performance against its own pre-launch baseline.

Enhanced semantic intent understanding: MUJI reported improved interpretation of queries expressed as needs and uses rather than product names, reducing inconsistent results and null queries.
Attribute-aware relevance: Stronger alignment between results and functional attributes such as material, dimension, and intended use.
Cross-category discovery: Products serving similar purposes surfaced together regardless of the taxonomy separating them.
Reduced operational overhead: Reduced reliance on manual tuning as seasonal assortments rotated and categories expanded.

Results

MUJI measured Marqo against its own pre-launch baseline on its US storefront, comparing bot-filtered, attributed data before and after go-live across search and collection browsing. Gains on the collection funnel were statistically significant at p<0.0001.

Overall Business Impact

+19.5%

Increase in Revenue per Collection User

+19.0%

Increase in Add-to-Cart Rate from Collections

What This Means

Matching customers to products by function and need, rather than by catalog terminology, aligned the search experience with the way MUJI's own products are designed and named.

Moving Forward

Marqo powers search across MUJI’s US storefront, supporting discovery in a catalog that spans household goods, apparel, furniture, and stationery.

Results reflect MUJI's experience during the measured period and may vary based on implementation, seasonality, traffic composition, and other business factors. Reported outcomes are MUJI's measurements and do not constitute a guarantee of future performance. Metrics were collected using MUJI'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. MUJI is a registered trademark of Ryohin Keikaku Co., Ltd. All other trademarks belong to their respective owners.