Search, teach, sell: how The Rag Company built a smarter on-site experience with Rebuy

A clean car runs better. It's faster, too — or at least that's what Shane Vaughan, CMO of The Rag Company, will tell you.

He's not entirely joking. The Rag Company has spent years building a brand around the belief that caring for your car is a skill worth learning, and that the right products make all the difference. As a manufacturer of premium microfiber towels and detailing tools, the brand sells to everyone from weekend hobbyists to professional detail shops — across Amazon, direct-to-consumer, and wholesale.

The glue holding it all together is a serious commitment to education. The company is known for its YouTube content that meets customers wherever they're at in their detailing journey and walks them through exactly what to do next. But with a catalog of over 2,000 SKUs and a customer base spanning every level of experience, translating that same helpfulness and clarity into the on-site experience was a different problem entirely.

Every customer who landed on the site had different needs, different knowledge, and a different history with the brand — and a one-size-fits-all recommendation engine wasn't going to cut it.

That's what brought them to Rebuy.

The Rag Company was introduced to Rebuy through Pilothouse, their agency partner, who brought the recommendation in response to a clear brief: how do we serve our customers better once they're on site, improve AOV and LTV, and do it in a way that delivers genuine value rather than gimmicks?

Over roughly a year, the team has built out a layered personalization strategy using several Rebuy tools in concert.

Smart Search: managing the full spectrum of queries to create a more personalized shopping experience 

As we touched on above, with a 2,000-SKU catalog, search is one of the highest-leverage surfaces on The Rag Company's site. Smart Search handles the obvious queries well — brand names, product categories, specific items the brand carries. But the real tuning happened at the edges.

Every site has a set of searches that return zero results, limited results, or results that technically exist but don't actually serve the customer: queries for competitor brands, misspellings, or product types the catalog doesn't carry. Left unmanaged, those searches quietly erode customer confidence and cost conversions over time. The Rag Company team dug into those query patterns and used Smart Search's controls to modify results, redirect customers to alternatives, and keep every search ending somewhere useful.

This level of dedication to personalization is what sets a brand with a highly technical product offering apart from their competitors. The Rag Company cares not only about what their customers want, but why they want it. Rebuy's tools allow them to dig into customer data so as to gain a deeper understanding of how their customers explored the product catalog — which gives them the ability to respond with a level of contextual awareness that wasn't there before. 

There's this set of searches that result in zero results, or limited results, or incorrect results — looking for brands we don't carry. Our ability to manage the customer experience through that, by modifying Smart Search, has been very effective for us.

Shane Vaughan CMO, The Rag Company

Content Search: where education meets commerce 

Continuing in the vein of context-aware merchandising, The Rag Company's most distinctive Rebuy implementation isn't about products at all — at least not directly. It's about knowledge.

The brand's core belief is that most customers want to take good care of their car - they just don't always know how. That philosophy has driven a significant YouTube presence full of tutorials, how-to guides, and product education; and a brand podcast where the hosts discuss higher level topics relevant to the automotive industry.

The challenge was that this content lived separately from the buying experience — until Content Search changed that.

With Content Search, the team can now surface educational videos and articles directly alongside product results in Smart Search. A customer searching for ceramic coating doesn't just see the product, they see a recommended 30-minute tutorial on how to actually apply it. For a product category where most shoppers know what they want but not how to use it, that pairing closes the gap between interest and confident purchase.

Education is a core value prop for us. Being able to use Smart Search to bring our educational content and lay that alongside the search has been incredibly successful for us.

Shane Vaughan CMO, The Rag Company

The same logic extends to product discovery. Microfiber towels, for example, perform significantly better over time when washed with a dedicated microfiber detergent, but most customers don't know this at the point of purchase. Rebuy lets the team surface both the product and the explanation behind it based on what's in the cart and what the customer has previously bought, turning a potential gap in product knowledge into a moment of genuine value.

Results: short-term revenue, long-term loyalty 

The impact showed up in both places the team was watching most closely: average order value and customer lifetime value.

Over a 30-day period, The Rag Company saw AOV increase by 30% — a direct result of smarter product discovery and cart optimization across the site.

More significantly, the team's 12-month reorder rate on new customers climbed from 25% to 30%. 

The two core metrics we look at are AOV and LTV. We've seen the most immediate impact in AOV — that's short-term money in the bank. But we're absolutely seeing the increase in LTV as well, particularly in reorder rates from new customers. And that improves the entire financial relationship behind the CAC-to-LTV ratio.

Shane Vaughan CMO, The Rag Company

The metrics are moving is because customers are having a better experience, not because the brand found a more persuasive button color. That's the secret sauce behind what makes a customer come back — a contextually relevant experience that feels personalized for them. 

We're surfacing the right products to the right customer at the right time. We're helping them actively make better buying decisions and have a better outcome with our products. The fact that it translates into incremental revenue is ideal — but it doesn't feel like a trick. The data tells me what we're doing is good for our customers, and that's why we're seeing those increases.

Shane Vaughan CMO, The Rag Company

What's next: replenishment and Smart Collections   

A year in, the team is now turning its attention to the next layer of personalization. Two initiatives are in focus.

Replenishment flows — both via Rebuy's Klaviyo integration and on-site — are the natural next step for a brand selling consumables. The challenge is that replenishment timing varies dramatically by customer: how often they detail their car, how many vehicles they have, whether they're a professional or a casual enthusiast. The goal is to build replenishment messaging that responds to individual purchase cadence rather than firing on a fixed schedule.

Smart Collections are also on the roadmap. Rather than sorting products by default Shopify rules, the team wants to present every collection in an order that reflects the individual customer's behavior and preferences — the logical extension of the personalization logic already at work across the rest of the site.

A quality site fit for a high-touch business

For The Rag Company, Rebuy hasn't just lifted AOV and improved retention. It's made the on-site experience consistent with the brand's core belief: that customers make better decisions when they're given the right information, at the right time.

The catalog is deep. The customer base is diverse. And now, the experience reflects both.

Since partnering with Rebuy, The Rag Company has elevated its online experience, improved upsell and discovery opportunities, and increased AOV by 30+% over the last 90 days.

Drive revenue growth 

+50,000 Shopify brands use Rebuy to create personalized shopping experiences that reduce costs, save time, and boost sales