Last year, four in five of The Sole Supplier’s new products were going live without the complete product data that Google and AI search engines needed to find them. One year into their partnership with Ocula, every launch is search-ready, with 1000s of compounded hours saved for their team. Here’s how they did it.
The Sole Supplier has always been ahead of the curve. Founded in 2013, it’s built a loyal following as one of Europe’s largest sneaker platforms, at the forefront of trainer and streetwear style. Today, they help more than 600,000 shoppers a month find the right product, from the right retailer, at the right price.
Product data is key to The Sole Supplier’s success. If a product’s details are missing, Google and AI assistants can’t find it, and neither can shoppers.
With 45,000 products on the UK site alone and hundreds more arriving every month, The Sole Supplier’s product enrichment and copywriting work was heaping up faster than their team could handle in house.
In August 2025, The Sole Supplier partnered with Ocula, an agentic product data and content optimisation platform, to make sure every product in its catalogue could be found by shoppers, search engines, and AI assistants alike.
A year into the partnership, every new product launches with full product content and data, and The Sole Supplier’s catalogue is reaching more shoppers across organic and AI search.
We spoke to Maya Traykova, Chief Product Officer, and Jamie Hyam, Product Manager, to find out how they did it.
At a glance
By enriching its product data with Ocula’s AI agents, The Sole Supplier now launches 100% of new products with complete, search-ready content, lifting organic traffic by 24%, and saving the team thousands of hours.
At a glance
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Traffic uplift | +24% |
| Average PDP ranking | Up 1.5 to 2 positions |
| Products launched with optimised product data and content | 20% → 100% |
| New product attributes per product, enabling discovery from AI assistants | ≈20 per product |
| Compounded time saved | >1,000s of hours |
The product data problem at the heart of online discovery
In August 2025, The Sole Supplier team were finding it a challenge to keep pace with their rapidly growing catalogue. Most new products were going live without the detail that search engines and AI tools needed to understand them: and great products need great product data.
The Sole Supplier adds hundreds of new products every month – up to 800 on the UK site alone! This time last year, only around 20% of these were going live with the full attributes, schema, and content they needed. Without clear product specifications or structured data, two similar pairs of trainers looked exactly the same to search engines and shoppers alike.
This problem was compounded by shoppers’ shifting search habits. Beyond typing keywords and scrolling, The Sole Supplier's audience were now asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Google’s AI Mode and Claude for recommendations, asking follow-up questions, searching with images, and blending conversational and transactional queries in the same journey. Being found now meant optimising for answer engines (AEO), as well as doubling down on traditional SEO.
For a multi-brand retailer like The Sole Supplier, the stakes were high. Sneaker and streetwear fans trust the platform’s eye for what’s worth wearing; their advantage is in their razor sharp curation.
But if a product page is missing the formatted specifications that AI tools and search engines need, those carefully chosen products are never surfaced, and search engines recommend brands or competitors instead.
Nowadays, you really have to focus on making products discoverable through alt text, descriptions, categories, schema, and structured data. It's a lot to think about, and it's been one of the biggest challenges we've faced.
How Ocula enriches product data before writing product content
For a small team, writing and researching full product content across 45,000 products wasn't realistic by hand. Manually enriching products drained up to 20 hours of the team’s time every week, and the backlog was piling up.
The Sole Supplier needed a way to scale content across every new product, and quickly.
Maya, The Sole Supplier’s Chief Product Officer, was impressed by Ocula from her very first meeting with Thomas McKenna, Ocula’s CEO and Co-Founder.
Ocula’s agents work by building a detailed picture of each product, adding and enriching attributes and datapoints based on images, catalogue, and web research for every single SKU. For The Sole Supplier, up to 20 attributes and datapoints were enriched and added for every SKU.
Then, the agents write and optimise the pages’ product content, so they’re optimised for AEO and SEO. All product content is based on The Sole Supplier’s own brand rules and channel mix.
The result is titles, metadata, product pages, and channel content that tell shoppers, AI agents and search crawlers exactly what each product is and who it’s for.
Enriching our product attributes and feeding these into our product content creation has been completely game changing.
Jamie, Product Manager at The Sole Supplier, led the technical setup. He and his team no longer need to research every product, or understand every detail of it, to ensure products are recommended to shoppers. Ocula has become an automated way of enhancing their products, adhering tightly to brand guidelines, and running QA and governance checks.
To think about how much quicker using Ocula was than optimising products manually, it was incredible.
Higher rankings, more traffic, and thousands of hours saved
A year ago, four in five new products went live without complete content. Today, 100% of new products launch with fully complete categories, schema, titles, descriptions, and product information, all optimised for discovery in SEO and AEO. Ocula has also optimised content for around 80% of the products that were previously missing it.
Richer product data is paying off in search, too. Average ranking for The Sole Supplier's product pages on Google is up by 1.5 to 2 positions, and a recent test combining descriptions generated by Ocula with enriched product data delivered a 24% uplift in organic traffic and 3% drop in bounce rate.
Before, we were getting stuck behind some competitors. Ocula has really helped close that gap.
Just as importantly, the partnership with Ocula has given Maya, Jamie, and their team their time back. The hours once lost to manual enrichment now go into the editorial content and creative work that makes The Sole Supplier stand out, as well as into projects that had previously stalled due to lack of resource.
If I could describe Ocula in one word, it would be efficiency. I can't even imagine how much time compounded it's saved us, but it must be thousands of hours.
A partnership that keeps pace
Within days, The Sole Supplier felt confident in using the Ocula platform. Ocula also keeps their team up to speed on the latest agentic commerce news and tactics, so staying ahead of the tech curve isn't something they have to do alone.
L-R: Isabelle Robinson (Customer Success at Ocula); Maya Traykova (Chief Product Officer at The Sole Supplier); Jamie Hyam (Product Manager at The Sole Supplier); Miranda Stephenson (Marketing at Ocula).
Maybe the biggest reason we've stayed in the partnership for so long is that feedback's been taken on board. Every time we come with a new feature idea, it seems to already be on the roadmap.
With a stronger product-data foundation for how shoppers discover products online, The Sole Supplier's team is free to focus on what it does best: spotting what’s next!
Whether you're a retailer in fashion like The Sole Supplier, furniture like The Conran Shop, or electronics like AO, the Ocula team can guide you on your product discovery optimisation journey.
Book a demo with Ocula here. You can also fill out this form to see how your SKUs perform against competitors on AI Search today.