He’d go through boxes, pull out centuries-old clay pipes wrapped in tissue paper, photograph each one, and enter the details into a database.
The goal was simple: take something hidden away and make it accessible to the people who wanted to find it. A few years later, sitting at a desk at Hobbycraft, doing almost exactly the same thing with craft products, he realized something. His tasks hadn’t changed much — only the collection had.
Fresh from a master’s in museum studies, he’d moved back to his hometown of Bournemouth and landed a six-week temporary contract — employee number three on the ecommerce team — with a single brief: get as many products onto the website as possible before Christmas.
The challenge of connecting
There was a photographer at the local store taking pictures, plus two copywriters and a physical hard drive that Alex and his colleague would collect from the store each week because the store didn’t yet have a web connection.
At the end of those six weeks, he was offered a permanent role. Over 15 years later, he’s still there.
What kept him at Hobbycraft wasn’t just familiarity. It was the same thing that had drawn him to museums in the first place — the challenge of connecting people to the things they’re looking for, in a way that feels intuitive and natural.
“If you compare visiting a museum to visiting a store or browsing a website, There are definitely a lot of connections,” Alex says.
“The person probably has an end goal in mind, even if they’re just looking around. They might want to see a particular thing, ask someone for help, or be completely self-guided. In a museum, you always have to cater to all of those people. It’s very similar to what you have to do in ecommerce.”
At Hobbycraft, that challenge is anything
but straightforward.
With the initial brief met and over 25,000 products in stock, Alex’s next task was to organize those products to make discovery as simple as possible. Several overhauls of the online taxonomy have kept him busy, with the category structure shifting and evolving as the company branched into new areas such as board games and downloadable patterns.
“We don’t have many direct competitors or examples to follow, so we’ve always had to come up with our own unique ways of organizing our catalog,” he adds. Recent innovations have included a sitewide “craft type” attribute, while data clean-up efforts have led to a consolidation of “product type” values from over 1,000 to around 200. But clean data is only half the story.
The customer base is as diverse as the product range — quilters and scrapbookers sit alongside Warhammer enthusiasts, crochet devotees, and parents hunting for the next big kids trend. And those customers are passionate, knowledgeable, and often ahead of the business in knowing what they want next. Alex’s job, in part, is to listen.
“We’ve always used search data to inform our taxonomy updates, because we want to make sure we’re using the same language as our customers. But over time, we’ve seen that it also pays off to pay close attention to any searches that have recently increased in volume, to see where the next trends are coming from,” says Alex.
How closely does your product taxonomy match the language your customers actually search with?
That kind of trend-spotting requires great data, and that’s where Loomi has become indispensable. Hobbycraft has been powering ecommerce search and merchandising experiences with Loomi since 2019, and Alex has been a committed power user since day one.
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How early does your team spot a trend before it becomes obvious?
When the business set up an internal AI working group last year, he was the one who brought Loomi Search+ to the table.
No UI changes, easy to activate, and potentially transformative under the hood, particularly for the longer, more specific searches that traditional keyword tools struggled with, like “knit a red scarf” or “children’s craft sets.”
And the change drove results, delivering a 4.5% RPV lift compared to the control group. From clay pipes in tissue paper to hobbying trend alerts, the mission has always been about taking what’s hidden, making it findable, and getting it to the right person.
Some things don’t change, no matter how the collection grows.
How well does your site's search understand long, specific queries like 'knit a red scarf'?
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Story 06 / 08
Head of Ecommerce & Digital Marketing, Never Fully Dressed
