How Redbubble Unlocked $11M+ in Incremental Revenue with Marqo

Company Overview

Redbubble is a global online marketplace for print-on-demand products featuring art from over 2 million independent artists. Founded in 2006, the platform enables customers to discover and purchase unique designs on apparel, home decor, stationery, and more. Redbubble operates internationally with offices in San Francisco, Melbourne, and Berlin, and serves millions of customers around the world.

Why Redbubble Evaluated Marqo

As Redbubble's catalog grew to millions of artist-generated listings, the team identified an opportunity to evolve on-site search and product discovery. Shoppers frequently searched using creative, conceptual, or thematic language, and the existing keyword-based system struggled to interpret intent behind queries like "funny bumper sticker from The Office" or "modern minimalist business background."

The goal was to modernize discovery to handle the long tail of descriptive, vague, and unconventional queries that are central to how creative marketplace shoppers browse, without relying on manual curation or static rules.

Challenges

Redbubble's catalog presented unique discovery challenges. With millions of artist-generated listings, product data was highly diverse, inconsistent in structure, and constantly growing. Traditional keyword search failed to connect creative shopper intent with the right designs, particularly for descriptive, conceptual, or misspelled queries. The team needed a system that could understand the meaning behind searches, not just match words, and surface relevant designs even when queries were vague, typo-prone, or unconventional.

Solution

Marqo installed a pixel on Redbubble's site to capture shopper interaction signals, including clicks, add-to-cart events, purchases, and browsing behavior. This data allowed Marqo to understand how shoppers search for designs by style, theme, and occasion across millions of artist-generated listings.

Marqo ingested these signals to train a custom LLM tailored to Redbubble's catalog. As new designs were uploaded and shopper behavior evolved, Marqo continuously updated relevance over time, delivering intent-aware results without relying on manual tagging or curation.

Semantic understanding of creative intent: Redbubble reported that Marqo accurately interpreted descriptive and conceptual queries, surfacing relevant designs for searches that keyword systems previously missed.
Resilience to vague and unconventional queries: Redbubble reported improved relevance for typo-prone, vague, and thematic searches, allowing users to quickly surface unique designs without needing exact product titles or artist names.
Reduced search abandonment: Redbubble observed lower bounce rates and reduced search abandonment, particularly on high-intent product category pages, as more shoppers found what they were looking for.

Results

Redbubble tested Marqo in a controlled, production A/B test over an 8-week period, with 20% of site traffic assigned to Marqo. During the measured period, Redbubble reported the following outcomes:

+21%

Increase in Add-to-Cart Rate

+2.9%

Uplift in Average Order Value

Redbubble reported improvements in discovery quality and commercial performance. By translating open-ended creative intent into confident purchase behavior, Marqo unlocked revenue from the long-tail, inspiration-led searches that keyword systems previously missed.

Moving Forward

With Marqo powering search across the marketplace, Redbubble is positioned to continue evolving product discovery for its global community of artists and shoppers.

Marqo has become a key part of Redbubble's discovery experience: delivering semantic relevance at marketplace scale with minimal engineering overhead and no manual curation.

Results reflect Redbubble's experience during the measured period and may vary based on implementation, seasonality, traffic composition, and other business factors. Reported outcomes are Redbubble's own measurements and do not constitute a guarantee of future performance. Marqo™ is a trademark of Marqo Inc. Redbubble® is a registered trademark of Redbubble Ltd. All other trademarks belong to their respective owners.