How Grove Collaborative Upleveled Their Product Discovery Experience with Constructor
INDUSTRY
Sustainable Consumer Products
HEADQUARTERS
San Francisco, California, USA
SOLUTIONS
Search, Autosuggest, Browse, Recommendations
Grove Collaborative is the world’s first plastic-neutral ecommerce company and supplier for brick-and-mortar retailers. They help customers go Beyond Plastic™ by offering sustainable alternatives to everyday products for every area in the home — from home cleaning and personal care to health and wellness, kids, pets, gardening, and more.
It’s a big mission to transform the consumer products industry into a force for human and environmental good, and Grove Collaborative needed a product discovery solution that could better meet customers wherever they are on their sustainability journey.
Grove Collaborative is the world’s first plastic-neutral ecommerce company and supplier for brick-and-mortar retailers. They help customers go Beyond Plastic™ by offering sustainable alternatives to everyday products for every area in the home — from home cleaning and personal care to health and wellness, kids, pets, gardening, and more.
It’s a big mission to transform the consumer products industry into a force for human and environmental good, and Grove Collaborative needed a product discovery solution that could better meet customers wherever they are on their sustainability journey.
The Challenge
Grove Collaborative came to Constructor using a home-grown product discovery solution that required creative workarounds to rank products attractively sitewide, which required significant manual upkeep of ranking attributes, synonyms, and more.
“We also added page elements that would allow the customer to navigate to a new assortment when the search results weren’t useful,” says Allie Andersen, Senior Site Merchandising Manager. “It wasn’t ideal as it required manual site merchandising intervention and wasn’t an optimized customer experience.”
The nuances of their industry and company values also added complexity.
“Grove Collaborative purposely carries a highly curated grouping of earth-friendly products. We intentionally don’t carry all brands or all the products,” explains Rebecca Carpenter, Senior Product Manager. “With our legacy search engine, this unfortunately meant that customers who performed a search could easily and often hit a null results page — even for something as common as cotton swabs, because customers would search using a brand name, like ‘Q tips,’ we don’t carry! We had basic analytics around null results prior to implementing Constructor, but seeing exactly how easy it was to hit null, or bad, results with our legacy solution, was shocking.”
Grove Collaborative quickly found themselves in a situation many large ecommerce companies wind up in when striving to improve their product discovery experience: spinning their wheels and strapped for resources. The engineering team was spending cycles maintaining a system that wasn’t best in class and merchandisers were using outdated tools — right during a time of expansion.
The Challenge
Grove Collaborative came to Constructor using a home-grown product discovery solution that required creative workarounds to rank products attractively sitewide, which required significant manual upkeep of ranking attributes, synonyms, and more.
“We also added page elements that would allow the customer to navigate to a new assortment when the search results weren’t useful,” says Allie Andersen, Senior Site Merchandising Manager. “It wasn’t ideal as it required manual site merchandising intervention and wasn’t an optimized customer experience.”
The nuances of their industry and company values also added complexity.
“Grove Collaborative purposely carries a highly curated grouping of earth-friendly products. We intentionally don’t carry all brands or all the products,” explains Rebecca Carpenter, Senior Product Manager. “With our legacy search engine, this unfortunately meant that customers who performed a search could easily and often hit a null results page — even for something as common as cotton swabs, because customers would search using a brand name, like ‘Q tips,’ we don’t carry! We had basic analytics around null results prior to implementing Constructor, but seeing exactly how easy it was to hit null, or bad, results with our legacy solution, was shocking.”
Grove Collaborative quickly found themselves in a situation many large ecommerce companies wind up in when striving to improve their product discovery experience: spinning their wheels and strapped for resources. The engineering team was spending cycles maintaining a system that wasn’t best in class and merchandisers were using outdated tools — right during a time of expansion.
“It’s a familiar story,” says Chris Clark, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. “We had built our own solution in-house, and it just didn’t make sense to continue putting our precious engineering time into it. We’d constantly have weird search bugs, bad synonyms, or empty results and were under-equipped to address even those basics — let alone actually personalize and target results.”
So, they went on the hunt for a product discovery platform with impressive out-of-the-box AI functionalities that would not only free up precious engineering and merchandiser time, but would also integrate quickly with their existing tech stack.
“One thing that stood out first was that we liked the APIs a lot. We assess a lot of these solutions from a tech and maintainability perspective, and we just knew we could get this up and running quickly, and it had just enough power and controls on the back-end for our merchandising team to really execute, without requiring an overwhelming amount of configuration,” Chris says.
The Constructor Difference
Before signing a contract, Grove Collaborative opted to see Constructor’s results for themselves by testing their current website with the Proof Schedule™.
The Proof Schedule™ is a live-value assessment that goes beyond a standard proof of concept process. It lasts 2-4 weeks and uses real data from a prospective customer’s website to quantify the lifts and ROI that new customers can expect to see once they implement Constructor. It’s a risk-free approach that gives retailers and brands the confidence they need to invest in product search and discovery.
Step One
Install beacon and send product catalog
Step Two
Opportunity analysis on your site, with your data
Step Three
Evaluation and business case
Step Four
AI dashboard with your insights
When the Proof Schedule™ was complete, the Grove team saw that the results spoke for themselves.
“Seeing the results meant we weren’t evaluating the Constructor capabilities on the word of a sales person. It wasn’t a ‘our system should handle your use cases,’ it was a ‘look, it does handle your use cases,’ which is very convincing when considering going all in on a new tool,” states Rebecca. “After hearing a lot of sales pitches, you learn to take promises of conformity into your business model and use cases with a grain of salt. Being able to see the tool working immediately with your own actual catalog, seeing the proof, means that there is much less room, if any, for embellishment of capabilities.”
And not only that, but they were able to witness the holistic approach of Constructor’s AI-native solutions.
“The completeness of the offering also mattered. We ran the proof of concept with search, knowing that we could fast-follow and drive bigger impact when we rolled Constructor out to our category pages and on-site carousels. That made it worth a premium price point vs search-only competitors,” says Chris.
Within three weeks after testing, Grove Collaborative was up and running with the following Constructor solutions: Search and Autosuggest, Browse, and Recommendations.
The Sustainable Results
20.07X
Overall ROI
4
Constructor products
Since implementing Constructor products in 2023, Grove Collaborative has seen considerable return on their investment.
ROI was calculated by taking the increase in revenue seen from A/B testing their legacy experience against Constructor’s and comparing the cost of the products minus the cost of their old solution. This shows a greater than 20x ROI, which both sides are very excited about.
Moreover, Grove’s team achieved especially notable wins from recommendation pods. Powered by Constructor engines and human strategy, recommendation pods are AI-powered product bundles that provide dynamic, “just-for-you” recommendations for individual shoppers. They can be placed strategically throughout ecommerce sites — homepage, product detail pages (PDPs), shopping cart, etc.
A well-executed recommendations strategy benefits companies and shoppers alike. For the company, recommendation pods help them improve business results. For consumers, offering attractive products at the right time makes their overall shopping journey quicker and more delightful.
“Much like our search infrastructure, our Recommendations pods were old and rigid,” explains Rebecca. “We had no way of updating the algorithms, and testing or swapping them out on any given page was a heavy engineering lift. Constructor recommendations enable us to play around with different strategies to maximize click-through and add-to-cart rates on a per-page basis.”
And equally as important as increasing business KPIs is the positive working relationship between the partners and Grove’s satisfaction with Constructor’s differentiated Customer Success approach.
“I have a night and day different experience working with Constructor support vs. other third party platform partners,” Allie says. “With another partner I work frequently with, 8 out of 10 times, their platform support either doesn’t take the time to understand the issue we are reaching out on, or the ticket gets lost in their queue. With Constructor, we have a much more personalized experience with partners who are responsive and take time to understand what we need.”
The partnership continues to bear fruits for the Grove team as they actively participate in product improvements. Through discovery sessions with Constructor’s Product team, Grove has influenced a variety of product and feature improvements, such as those done to Merchant Intelligence, attribute-based slotting, POD searchandizing, and algorithms weighting new products.
“It feels significant that Constructor holds these types of sessions,” says Rebecca. “As a product manager myself, I understand how important it is to build the right tools and features for your customers instead of just building what you think the customer needs. The teams came in prepared with a lot of questions, but also made space to listen.”
They’ve also played a role in guiding the direction of Recommendations, weighing in on “buy it again” strategies, bundles, merchant controls, and more.
“We were able to share our ‘in-the-wild’ use cases for these [products and] features and describe how we would use them at our company. It was a great opportunity to help inform the build process,” says Allie.
Sustainability Is Here to Stay
What’s next for the Constructor and Grove Collaborative partnership? According to Rebecca, quite a bit.
“Looking to the future, we see [Constructor] as a tool we’ll continue to use as we make our sustainability mission unavoidable throughout the customer experience from our website to our email and retention marketing efforts — enabling customers to filter by things such as our Beyond Plastic™ product selection and highlight Grove’s strict ingredients standards and sustainability values,” Rebecca shares. “Constructor will also play a big role in expanding our Shopper Marketing Program, enabling us to offer more high-value placement options for our partners to advertise their products.”
The ongoing white-glove support from Constructor makes advancing their sustainability mission even easier.
“The Constructor partnership has been great,” says Allie. “The team is very supportive and responsive to our questions and needs that we express. From the beginning, I have felt that they listen closely to understand our goals and take our feedback seriously.”
With their new product discovery solution based on API-first architecture in full swing, Grove is able to continue creating and curating sustainable products that not only meet customers wherever they are on their own sustainability journeys, but also fully satisfy their interests, wants, and needs. All with the purpose of transforming the consumer products industry into a sustainable force for human and environmental good.
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