Marimekko Decision Factory
The Marimekko Decision Factory is a reinforcement learning -based personalization engine, running a factory abstraction for scalability. The factory recommends, personalizes, and optimizes virtually anything on Marimekko’s website to match users’ interest. While doing so, it learns from user behavior in real time and does not require past data assets nor expert data science skills to be scaled across the company's digital platforms. Most importantly, it generates new insights about what customers actually want - without data-induced bias.
Just hours after its launch, the conversion rates on the site improved significantly and a double-digit increase in homepage-to-funnel conversion was achieved with a model that had only three hours of data in its hands.
Marimekko Decision Factory Pause Know thy customer - in real-time
Marimekko gave Thoughtworks the challenge to design and build a scalable personalization engine that strengthens Marimekko’s profitable growth through an increasingly broad customer base. The engine should enable compelling digital experiences - while increasing customer understanding.
Oftentimes, digital platforms are seen merely as another sales channel while leaving out possibilities to actually learn and support the business beyond incremental improvement and conversion optimization. This is where we wanted to go on a different path - learning as much as possible, in as many ways as possible, while improving the customer experience.
Furthermore, we wanted to create something that limits the need for endless AI point-solutions and reduces the total cost of ownership for AI technology. To achieve all of this, Marimekko and Thoughtworks created a cross-functional team to design and build the end-to-end decision factory within two months.
Creating truly personalized experiences
Generally speaking, personalization can be divided into two categories, illustrated in the image below.
Recommending from a finite action set like frontpage artwork, discount percentages or landing page assets
Recommending from a potentially very large action set, such as thousands of products (SKUs)