New Look
How we helped New Look drive the UK’s largest non-brand SEO gain
Our partnership with New Look began during the 2020 lockdown, a period of unprecedented volatility where consumer behaviour shifted overnight. We quickly realised that traditional monthly data was too slow for a brand of this scale. To solve New Look’s unique bottlenecks, including persistent development freezes and a time-poor internal team, we didn’t just change our strategy; we built a solution.
After doubling visibility from 3% to 7%, we were tasked with doubling it again to overtake their largest competitor. With zero dev support and a soft fashion market, we had to move from being an agency to a technology-led Value Engine. We used our AI + Human approach to bypass retail bottlenecks and put the right products on site, at scale, at the right time.
(The Opportunity)
After doubling New Looks’s visibility (3% to 7%) in a year, our next task was to double it again to overtake their largest competitor. We faced a perfect storm of constraints: a site-wide development freeze (zero dev support for SEO), a 50% reduction in the internal team, and a softer fashion market brought on by the cost of living crisis. To win, we had to innovate and bypass the traditional retail bottlenecks entirely.
(The Approach)
To help New Look win we developed Metis, the proprietary tech that helped us move 4x faster than the competition
Metis is our proprietary commercial intelligence platform that transforms reactive retail operations into a proactive growth engine. Engineered to solve the data lag of traditional SEO, Metis identifies valuable consumer trends and search demand 4x faster than competitors, allowing us to bypass technical bottlenecks and react to market shifts in real-time.
Moving 4x faster than the market using Metis Demand Tracker
We transitioned New Look to a weekly cadence, using real-time signals to ensure they were first-to-market for rising trends. By cross-referencing demand with stock levels, we prioritised high-margin opportunities and captured demand weeks ahead of the competition, turning SEO into a proactive revenue driver.
Bypassing Blockers with Metis Accelerate
To target long-tail search queries without developer support, we created Metis Accelerate, a ‘single-click’ category builder that dynamically builds and hosts high-value PLPs. Accelerate curates content and executes a cross-linking algorithm that bolsters the authority of “parent” categories (e.g., Maxi Dresses). We built 5,218 categories which delivered a 107% increase in revenue YoY.
By combining this autonomous technical approach with brilliant Digital PR to make products famous and future-proof the brand for GEO, we helped New Look secure the largest non-brand gain in the UK fashion market. This integrated strategy ensures that New Look isn’t just winning today’s search battle, but is positioned as a cited authority for the next generation of AI-led discovery.
Scaling Content with Product Maestro
Faced with a depleted internal copy team and the risk of delayed launches, New Look needed a way to automate PDP creation. That’s why we created and deployed Product Maestro. This is our generative AI solution that ‘reads’ product images, automatically extracting key visual attributes, such as silhouette, texture and colour, and combines them with real-time search demand to generate unique, conversion-led copy.
This programmatic approach essentially acts as a ‘force multiplier’ for teams, delivering 4x faster time-to-market and saving thousands of manual hours that would otherwise be spent on repetitive SKU-level drafting. Using this approach, we embedded search data into 15,000 product descriptions at the point of creation, future-proofing New Look for Google’s product-focused SERPs and resulting in a 15% increase in PDP traffic YoY.
Cross Team Empowerment
We broke internal silos by embedding Metis data across the business. Digital PR made products famous as demand peaked, while Buying and Merchandising aligned stock with search velocity.
