Challenge

Cotopaxi needed search that could keep up with one of the most complex catalogs in outdoor retail.

When Doug Small, Senior Ecommerce Manager at Cotopaxi, evaluated their site search, the gap was clear. Customers searching for something like "lightweight packable rain jacket" or a specific Del Dia colorway were getting results that missed the mark. For a brand built on unique, one-of-a-kind products made from repurposed materials, generic keyword matching was never going to cut it.

Their previous search provider, Fast Simon, struggled with the nuances of Cotopaxi's catalog. The Del Dia line alone presented a unique challenge: every single product is made from different remnant fabrics, meaning color and material attributes vary at the individual item level. Standard search tools weren't built for that kind of complexity.

Cotopaxi initially explored building a custom integration directly with Google Cloud's Vertex AI Search for Commerce. But the upfront engineering costs and ongoing maintenance for an untested solution made it hard to justify, especially when the team needed to move fast and prove results before committing long-term resources.

Solution

Instead of a six-figure custom build, Cotopaxi was live with Google-quality search in 72 hours.

Through Retail Cloud Connect, Cotopaxi plugged directly into Google's Vertex AI Search for Commerce without the custom integration project. The app handled the hard parts that would have taken months to build in-house:

• Real-time catalog sync with automatic attribute mapping, including Cotopaxi's complex color variants that needed to meet Google Cloud's specific color family requirements.

• Custom theme integration that matched Cotopaxi's fully custom storefront pixel-for-pixel. The Nimstrata team delivered a version ready for testing within 72 hours.

• Search, collections, and recommendations all powered by the same Google AI that handles product discovery at enterprise scale.

The implementation became one of the fastest external vendor rollouts in Cotopaxi's online history.

Nimstrata provided exceptional, white-glove service throughout the entire process of implementing Google Vertex AI. They went above and beyond to ensure everything was tailored to our specific needs and completed in a timely manner.

- Doug Small, Senior Ecommerce Manager, Cotopaxi

Results

Search conversion jumped 44.78% while relevance and accuracy reached near-perfect levels.

After switching from Fast Simon to Vertex AI Search through Retail Cloud Connect, Cotopaxi saw:

• 44.78% higher conversion rate from search - customers finding what they want are buying it.

• 29.23% increase in search relevance - queries return meaningfully better results across the catalog.

• 97.94% keyword accuracy - nearly every search term now returns relevant products, including complex queries for specific Del Dia colorways and product attributes.

Beyond the numbers, the migration also reduced costs by moving off their previous solution. And because Retail Cloud Connect handled the integration complexity, Cotopaxi got enterprise-grade Google AI search without the enterprise-grade engineering project.

Since the implementation, we've seen an increase in our search conversion rate while also reducing costs by moving away from our previous solution. Nimstrata has gone above and beyond our expectations.

- Doug Small, Senior Ecommerce Manager, Cotopaxi