From introducing a world-first image search experience to using customer search data to inform product planning, Domus is changing how architects and designers discover architectural surfaces.
About Domus
Domus Group is one of the UK’s leading suppliers of tiles, stone and wood for commercial and residential projects. Working closely with architects, interior designers and specifiers, the company has built a reputation for design expertise, innovation and an extensive product portfolio.
For Domus, maintaining that leadership means continually exploring new ways to support the design and specification process, including the experience it provides online.
The ambition: Bringing visual discovery into the specification process
Architects and designers work visually. Inspiration can come from a photograph, a material sample, a completed project or a particular texture or pattern.Yet traditional product search often requires designers to translate what they’re looking at into keywords, product categories and filters.
Domus recognised an opportunity to offer something different: a way for customers to discover products directly from visual references, making its digital experience more closely aligned with how designers work.
When Stylib introduced the concept of AI-powered image search, Domus saw the potential to bring an entirely new approach to the architectural surfaces market.
“At Domus, we’ve always aimed to lead the market, not follow it. We wanted our website to reflect that same ambition, giving architects and designers new and better ways to discover our products. Visual search was a natural step in that direction.”
David Kong
Marketing Director at Domus
The solution: A world-first visual search experience
In 2022, Domus and Stylib launched an AI-powered image search experience, described at launch as the world’s first visual search solution offered by a hard-surfaces supplier.Instead of starting with a product name or category, designers can upload a photograph, screenshot or visual reference and discover visually similar products from Domus’s extensive catalogue.
Users can then refine their search, explore related options and move directly to product information and sample requests.
The experience was integrated into the Domus website, making visual discovery part of the existing customer journey.
The launch also attracted industry attention, including coverage in Dezeen.
The results: Visual search becomes an established part of product discovery
What started as an innovative way to explore products has become an established part of the Domus digital experience.
An analysis conducted approximately one year after launch found that around 30% of external search activity was visual, demonstrating the appetite for image-led discovery among users outside the Domus team.
Today, hundreds of people use the experience every month to find products using photographs, textures, patterns and other visual references.
Supporting the Domus team, wherever they work
The benefits extend beyond customers browsing the website.
Domus’s own team has adopted visual search as a practical tool for finding and presenting products, particularly when working outside the showroom or meeting architects and designers in their offices.
Rather than relying solely on product names or manually navigating the catalogue, team members can use visual references to identify relevant options during customer conversations.
This makes image search valuable not only as a digital discovery feature, but also as a day-to-day resource for Domus’s customer-facing teams.
Beyond search: Turning customer behaviour into commercial intelligence
One of the most significant longer-term benefits has been the visibility Domus now has into customer interests and emerging design preferences.
Through Stylib’s search analytics, Domus receives monthly reports showing what people are searching for, which products attract attention and the types of visual references customers use.
This gives its team access to a valuable source of market intelligence: insight into what architects and designers are exploring today, potentially months before that interest translates into specifications, orders or sales.
Domus is already using these insights to help inform its procurement, range planning and product development decisions.
Rather than relying exclusively on historical sales data or direct customer enquiries, its team can now draw on actual search behaviour to better understand demand.
“One of the biggest benefits has been the visibility we now have into what our customers are looking for. We can see the styles, colours and materials attracting interest, even before they translate into sales. That’s valuable information when we’re planning future collections and deciding what products to source.”
David Kong
Marketing Director at Domus
From innovation to long-term business value
Domus initially introduced visual search to bring a new level of product discovery to the architectural surfaces industry.
Several years on, its value extends well beyond the original customer experience. Image search is used by external customers and Domus’s own team, while the data generated through those interactions helps inform commercial decisions.
The partnership demonstrates how investing in better product discovery can deliver more than a modern website experience. It can also give manufacturers and suppliers a clearer understanding of what their customers want, supporting better-informed decisions about their future product offering.