Shopify brand Marine Layer Leverages Product Recommendations to drive high-growth conversions

About Marine Layer

Marine Layer is a San Francisco-based apparel brand known for crafting “absurdly soft” clothing that fuses comfort, sustainability, and California cool. Since launching in 2009, they’ve opened over 50 brick-and-mortar stores and counting, demonstrating their high-growth as a brand. They’ve built a loyal following through their custom fabrics and standout Re-Spun program, which turns old tees into fresh styles—keeping textiles out of landfills and customers coming back.

The Challenge

Marine Layer had just wrapped a full site redesign with Pattern, now part of Domaine, on modernizing their Shopify storefront to better reflect their in-store brand experience.

But visual polish wasn’t enough—they wanted the site to work harder by making it easier for shoppers to find what they love. The team needed a personalization solution that was intelligent, intuitive, and scalable.

The Marine Layer team was looking for effective ways to:

Boost conversion rates
Improve relevance of product discovery through the use of AI
Save time with smarter merchandising

They evaluated multiple providers, but chose Nosto for its modular, AI-powered capabilities and seamless integration with Shopify.

The Solution

Marine Layer rolled out Nosto’s Product Recommendations in two key areas:

Product Detail Pages (PDPs)
Mini Cart

To improve product discovery, the Marine Layer team wanted to clearly showcase relevant product alternatives and complementary add-ons on key pages.

Both campaigns were configured with:

Relationship score-based logic: a model that considers how strongly products are connected, giving more weight to items frequently bought or added to cart together than to those only viewed together.
Advanced dynamic filtering: to further fine-tune which products are shown, ensuring recommendations match the product’s gender category (men’s or women’s), and sale status.
Visual AI color matching: to suggest alternatives or add-ons in similar shades.
Exclusion rules: to filter out accessories and low-priority SKUs.
Best seller fallback: if no products match all criteria, a fallback is applied to ensure recommendations are always shown, prioritizing top revenue-generating items.

“Collaborating with Pattern and Nosto on our Shopify 2.0 rebuild has opened exciting new opportunities. Even with just two recommendation placements live, we’ve seen strong results, and it all runs seamlessly in the background. The intuitive setup and automation have saved us time, and we’re excited to explore more of Nosto’s AI capabilities.”

Rosalind Volckmann, Director of Marketing & Ecommerce

Even with just two product recommendation placements live, Marine Layer saw immediate, measurable returns, proving that even small steps in improving relevance through AI can lead to outsized impact.

The results?

Shoppers who engaged with Nosto recommendations, compared to those who did not:

Were 2x more likely to convert
Spent 31.5% more per order on average
Showed +125% higher revenue per session

Beyond the numbers, the team noted how hands-off the setup became post-launch. Nosto’s real-time automation, advanced filtering, and fallback logic ensured that recommendations stayed relevant without daily input—saving time and simplifying their merchandising workflows.

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