Scoring Big with AI: How Big 5 Sporting Goods Scaled Personalization

Managing digital revenue for a major retailer means constantly wrestling with catalog size. You have thousands of SKUs across dozens of categories, a diverse customer base, and aggressive revenue targets.

The bottleneck usually isn't strategy. It's execution. Merchandisers spend hours in spreadsheet and basic recommendation tools building static carousels, while engineering backlogs turn basic personalization tests into multi-quarter IT projects.

Big 5 Sporting Goods had this experience. They suffered from vendor fatigue after past tools overpromised, took months to configure, and failed to move the revenue needle. Instead, Big 5 needed a solution, a partner, that could automate catalog complexity without draining internal engineering resources.

They partnered with Breinify to replace manual merchandising with automated 1:1 personalization. The results were historic:

• 31.82x Overall ROI

• +197.75% YoY surge in monthly revenue

• 10.41x more checkouts

Here is how Big 5 transformed personalization from a manual chore into an automated revenue driver.

1. Complimenting Manual Merchandising for Real-Time Intent

Manual rules reflect human guesses, not actual shopper behavior. But they can miss powerful cross-category buying patterns, like shoppers looking for camping equipment who also need specific footwear, or a family buying youth soccer gear who also needs a pop-up tent for the sidelines. These nuances are lost in manual lists and basic other tools which fail to adjust dynamically as inventory or trends shift.

Big 5 deployed Breinify’s personalization platform, powered by Temporal AI, which treats context, sequence, and time (such as seasonality, local conditions, and real-time browsing sequences) as core behavioral features. Instead of relying on static customer profiles, the AI predicts what a shopper wants right now across five key experiences:

• Product Detail Pages (PDPs): AI-generated "You May Also Like" carousels that adjust based on real-time browsing context.

• Homepage Navigation: Dynamic "Trending Categories" that replace hardcoded links with AI-prioritized selections.

• Homepage Layouts: Multi-spot "Big Deals" layout testing that places high-value promotions where user engagement is highest.

• Cart Interstitials: Interactive add-to-cart pop-ups that capture immediate cross-sell opportunities.

• Search Re-ranking: Re-ranking search output based on situational relevance to get shoppers to checkout in fewer clicks.

2. Speed to Value: Launching in Days, Not Quarters

Traditional personalization software often stalls during deployment. Breinify eliminated onboarding drag by deploying traffic listeners before full launch, allowing the AI engine to evaluate live traffic patterns ahead of time.

Because Breinify integrated directly with Big 5’s existing Oracle content system and product feeds via a single lightweight script, there was no need to rewrite database schemas or build custom templates.

The result? Big 5 launched experiences like Homepage Dynamic Categories in just 3 days with virtually zero lift from internal engineering or data science teams.

3. Turning Behavioral Insights into Business Impact

Automating dynamic experiences didn't just drive revenue; it freed up Big 5's merchant teams. The AI uncovered hidden cross-category relationships that manual rules missed, giving the team data-backed confidence to scale personalization across channels.

Tracked over 15 months, Big 5 saw a >4x YoY quarterly ROI improvement (scaling from 3.15x to 13.47x in Q1 alone).

"As our business continues to evolve, it's important to work with partners who are always looking ahead with us. The Breinify team consistently brings new ideas, helps us think through what we should focus on next, and moves quickly to turn those ideas into new customer experiences."

— James Ho, Director of eCommerce, Big 5 Sporting Goods

The Takeaway

High-impact personalization doesn't require massive data science teams or custom engineering infrastructure. By pairing flexible and powerful tools with a partner committed to rapid testing, Big 5 unlocked a scalable growth engine that runs without the IT drag and manual work of other solutions.