Google-grade retail search

Dunelm is the UK’s market leader in homewares. Founded in 1979 as a curtains stall in Leicester Market, Dunelm has grown to 184 stores across the UK and employs around 11,500 people.

Dunelm’s annual sales are more than £1.7 billion, and digital channels account for 39% of sales.

In 2023, Dunelm joined a small number of retailers moving quickly with AI to transform their customer experiences and boost revenue.

Dunelm sought to upgrade their first-generation retail search engine to Google Cloud’s Vertex AI Search for Retail platform to provide seamless, relevant and increasingly personalized shopping journeys for customers. 

As a preferred Google Cloud Vertex AI partner, Valtech worked alongside the Google Cloud and Dunelm teams to test Vertex AI Search for Retail.

We integrated alongside Dunelm’s engineering, search and analytics teams, and we led initial development work to ensure we could test the tooling correctly.

We then helped Dunelm ingest their data catalog and set up ways of working that were compatible with both the tooling and with Dunelm’s organizational structures.

Valtech are uniquely able to support this kind of work because we have a tried-and-tested program for demonstrating Vertex AI’s value — and its impact on bottom lines. 

Here is what Vertex AI has already delivered for Dunelm:

• Search performance. Less than 1% of searches deliver zero results. Vertex AI is learning from customer queries and delivering better and more relevant results every day.

• Customer experience. With Vertex AI Search for Retail, Dunelm can now offer Google-quality product discovery on its website, resulting in a significantly improved search experience for its customers.

At Dunelm, a key part of our strategy is to improve the ways we connect products to our customers. Partnering with Google Cloud brings this innovative generative AI solution to our online search capabilities, making it much easier for customers to find the products they want. This is an exciting step forward in providing a best-in-class online shopping experience. By leveraging the power of AI, we're making it easier than ever for our customers to find inspiration, supporting our growth potential as The Home of Homes.

John Gahagan, Chief Technology and Information Officer at Dunelm 

Dunelm have positioned themselves as one of a handful of companies shaping the future of UK retail, and they’ve laid a foundation for future advancements in personalization.