Case study deck · 9 slides
DTC & ecommerce
Illustrative scenarioPersonalization that merchandisers actually run
A mid-market DTC brand
Illustrative scenario based on our methodology, not a specific client engagement. Figures are representative targets, not claimed results.
The challenge
What was broken
The recommender was live everywhere within six weeks and technically correct within eight, then became furniture. Merchandisers stopped opening the console because it gave a confidence score, not a reason, so the safe move was to quietly override and move on. Multiply that weekly across every category and the rank order decayed into something nobody trusted or bothered to improve.
The approach
Scored on the Durable AI Index
We scored every surface on the Durable AI Index and found the effort was inverted: the hero banner had a design review and a CMO agenda slot on a surface shoppers glance at once a session, while product pages, cart and SMS, hit five to twenty times a visit, ran untouched vendor defaults. So we moved the effort to match the traffic.
What we built
The system, not just the model
We redesigned the workflow around the model, then built the pieces that make it run every day.
- 1
Reason-code layer replacing bare scores with plain-English rationale
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Weekly tuning console scoped to PDP, cart and lifecycle messaging
- 3
Override-tracking dashboard feeding manual corrections back to the model
- 4
Reasoned recommendations extended into post-purchase email and SMS
Inside the build
Where the design hours went vs. where the shoppers were
Each surface plotted by how often shoppers hit it against how much design effort it received before the rebuild.
Tools & systems
Results
Illustrative scenarioWhat good looks like
Focus on the two metrics that compound for DTC
Illustrative target: lift in average order value
A tuning cadence the team owns, not a set-and-forget tool
Legible recommendations merchandisers actually use
This is an illustrative case built to represent a pattern we see repeatedly in mid-market DTC engagements, not a real client's measured results. The numbers below are representative, not audited figures from a named company.
How it stuck
Adoption is the deliverable
The habit that stuck is unglamorous: fifteen minutes every Monday, three merchandisers, one screen, reading reason codes before anyone overrides. It survived because a merchandiser could repeat the reasoning to their own boss without paraphrasing a black box, and the hero banner didn't get worse, it just got right-sized to a quarterly review.
“The banner got the design reviews because the CMO looks at it every morning. The cart page got the sales.”
Gaurav Bhushan Sharma, 10dem
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