The Brand

AS Colour is a New Zealand–founded apparel brand recognized globally for its premium base garments. Established in 2005, the company produces high-quality, ethically made essentials designed as the perfect canvas for creators, businesses, and everyday consumers. Guided by its “Built to Last” philosophy, the brand combines durability, timeless design, and responsible production to scale simplicity worldwide.

Today, AS Colour operates across New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States, supported by 34 retail stores and showrooms worldwide, along with six distribution centers. In Australia alone, it generates more than AUD 120 million in annual revenue, positioning it firmly within the mid- to large-sized fashion and apparel market.

Serving both direct-to-consumer and wholesale audiences, sales are driven through a sophisticated ecommerce platform, physical retail stores, and a robust wholesale network. With thousands of SKUs across styles, colors, and sizes, AS Colour’s product feed requirements are complex and inventory-sensitive. Accurate, real-time data across regions, stock levels, pricing tiers, and promotional activity is critical to supporting both paid media performance and wholesale growth. Managing this scale efficiently while maintaining brand consistency across markets has been central to their ongoing digital strategy.

The Challenge

AS Colour’s ecommerce experience was built on BigCommerce and supported by a previous search and merchandising provider that required significant manual intervention to manage. The platform was clunky, time-consuming, and not particularly user-friendly, making it difficult for the team to efficiently optimize search results, merchandising rules, and product categorization.

As the business scaled across multiple markets and continued to expand its product range, this manual approach became increasingly restrictive. Managing search relevance, refining product discovery, and maintaining consistent categorization across thousands of SKUs required more power and flexibility than the existing setup could provide. AS Colour needed a more sophisticated solution to elevate onsite search, streamline merchandising, and deliver a smoother, more intuitive user experience across its global ecommerce sites.

The Solution

To address the limitations of its previous setup, AS Colour implemented Athos Commerce’s search and discovery platform to power onsite search, merchandising, and product discovery across its BigCommerce environment. After reviewing two to three shortlisted providers, the functionality of Athos Commerce’s tools and in-region team of discovery experts stood out clearly. The platform’s intuitive interface, depth of merchandising capability, and strong native integration with BigCommerce made it a natural fit. A structured test-and-optimize phase reinforced confidence early, delivering immediate improvements in search relevance and usability. Access to local technical support in a compatible time zone also played an important role in the decision.

Implementation was collaborative and well-structured. AS Colour had internally designed category pages that required careful alignment with the new search and discovery framework. Development partner Moustache Republic supported the technical integration, including the functionality of the high-converting search bar and the behavior of product listing pages. The rollout was seamless overall, supported by regular check-ins and clear communication, and was delivered in line with project timelines.

Today, AS Colour uses Athos Commerce’s search and discovery tools to power site search, advanced merchandising rules, and product recommendations across the website and within the upsell cart experience. The team actively manages category merchandising, promotional banners, and automated rules to surface priority products, while also leveraging Athos’s feed management capabilities as part of a newer integration to power off-site feed optimization for channels including Google Shopping and Meta, with key marketplaces launching soon. The result is a significantly more dynamic, data-driven, and scalable ecommerce experience that supports both growth and operational efficiency.

The Results

Since implementing Athos Commerce’s search and discovery platform, AS Colour has seen a marked improvement in both customer experience and internal efficiency. Search results are now significantly more accurate and intuitive, including the ability to dynamically recognize and correct spelling errors, apply intelligent redirects, and deliver more relevant product matches. Given that the majority of AS Colour customers use search over traditional navigation, enhancing this functionality has had a meaningful impact on how shoppers interact with the site. Customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, reinforcing the value of a faster, more seamless search journey.

Beyond search accuracy, the platform has unlocked greater visibility into customer behavior. Heat mapping and onsite analysis have revealed strong engagement with filters on product listing pages—an interaction the team previously had limited insight into. Personalized product recommendations, particularly within the cart upsell experience, are also delivering encouraging performance metrics, contributing to a more tailored and personalized shopping journey.

Operationally, the impact has been just as significant. Automation through merchandising rules, redirects, and improved category controls has alleviated a substantial amount of manual workload for the internal team—which is very lean—freeing up time for more strategic initiatives.

TABLE 1. AS COLOUR RESULTS BY REGION

The results in Table 1 demonstrate a clear and consistent trend across most regions. Customers who use search convert at significantly higher rates than those who do not, with standout performance in the US and Australia where search users convert above 21 percent. In multiple key markets, search now drives more than 60 percent of total online revenue, firmly establishing it as a primary growth channel rather than a supporting feature.

Product recommendations are also driving meaningful incremental revenue, delivering seven-figure impact in major markets within just 90 days. On average, they influence approximately $1M AUD in revenue per market over the same period.

Collectively, the data reinforces a simple outcome: investing in high-performing search and discovery is not just improving user experience—it is materially driving revenue growth at scale.

Future Plans

While the impact to date has been significant, AS Colour sees further opportunity to deepen its use of Athos Commerce’s platform. A key focus area is A/B testing, enabling the team to more rigorously test merchandising strategies, search configurations, and recommendation placements to further optimize performance.

There is also strong interest in exploring the AI capabilities within the Athos platform. Leveraging these features presents an opportunity to enhance automation, relevance, and personalization at scale.

From a merchandising perspective, the team is looking to implement more advanced seasonal rules that can be set in advance, creating a more proactive and efficient promotional workflow. Work is also underway to refine and improve the search window design to further elevate the onsite shopping experience.

In addition, AS Colour has recently implemented the Feed Management module, which is already driving strong performance while providing enhanced control over product data and distribution across Bing, Google, and Meta. Next up will be launching marketplace integrations to unlock further sales channels including Amazon, eBay, and The Iconic.

Together, these initiatives reflect a continued commitment to evolving search and discovery as a core growth lever across all markets and channels.

Partner with Athos Commerce to transform your ecommerce store. With proven tools and expertise in search and merchandising, we empower businesses to achieve measurable growth. Contact us today to start optimizing your store for success.