Hero nav is really 'me nav', built for trading teams, not customers. What happens when you listen to how shoppers actually shop, plus three actions.
(And What a Real Hero Actually Looks Like)
Every Retailer Has One. Most Are Doing It Wrong.
There it is. Right at the top of the page.
The big boxes. The bold banners. The links that every trading team argues about every single Monday morning.
Hero banners. Hero products. Hero offers.
It’s the most valuable real estate on your site. And the name says it all, right? This is where the heroes live.
But after collaborating with some of the world's largest retailers, I've come to a rather uncomfortable realisation.
Most hero nav isn’t heroic at all.
It’s something else entirely. And I think most of us already know it, even if we’d rather not say it out loud.
It’s Not a Hero Nav. It’s a ‘Me Nav’.
Think about how most retailers actually decide what goes in their hero nav.
It’s a trading meeting. Someone has a lot of stock to shift. A buyer is pushing their pet category. The head of commercial wants visibility for a brand deal.
The question being asked, underneath all the polite meeting language, is basically: “What do we need to flog?”
That’s not heroism. That’s self-preservation with branding.
We might as well call it what it is: Me Nav. Built to save the retailer, not the customer.
Guess what. Your customers can feel the difference.
People aren’t naive. They know when they’re being guided and when they’re being sold to. They’ve been trained by Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify to expect relevance. When your nav screams, “we’ve got a load of ski jackets to get rid of,” they feel it - even if they can’t name it.
Here's Where it Starts to Fall Apart.
Now, I want to be fair here. The trading meeting wasn’t designed to be cynical.
It made sense when your range was manageable. When you had 200 products and 6 categories, your merchandising team could get a decent feel for what customers wanted, apply some judgment, and make it work.
But scale broke it.
Take FoundIt! customer, B&Q . Over 1.5 million products across a marketplace. No trading team on the planet can manually curate nav for that. Not well. Not in real time. Not in a way that actually reflects what customers are looking for today.
What happens instead? The nav gets built once, gets stale, and sits there like a static billboard while customer demand moves on without it.
The hero isn’t even paying attention to the person it’s supposed to be rescuing.
No one’s listening to the clicks. The searches. The signals customers generate every single second. And that’s where the real opportunity is being left on the table.
So What Happens When You Actually Listen?
I want to share a story that, for me, captures exactly what this shift looks like in practice.
One of our fashion partners saw a spike in demand signals for trench coats. Searches increasing. Click-through rates climbing. Customers clearly telling us, in their behaviour, that this is trending right now.
They called us and said, “Trench coats are trending. We want to make sure it’s featured in the nav.”
We refreshed the page. It was already there.
The FoundIt! system had already spotted the trend, assembled the right products, and surfaced it in the nav. No meeting required. No manual intervention. The customer had spoken, and the nav had listened.
Now contrast that with another conversation we had, where a retailer called us frustrated. They’d pushed a load of ski jackets into a category and couldn’t understand why our nav wasn’t surfacing them.
We explained: if no one’s clicking, no one’s searching, no one’s responding — the absence of signal is the signal. The nav wasn’t ignoring your ski jackets. It was telling you something about them.
That’s not a technology problem. That’s a ranging problem.
Customers Don't Shop in Categories. They Shop in Vibes.
Here’s where it gets really interesting. And honestly, this is the part that gets me most excited about where this is all heading.
True intent-led navigation doesn’t just surface existing categories. It spots emerging themes that don’t even have a category yet.
We had a brilliant example of this with FoundIt! customer, Marks and Spencer in their Coats & Jackets, category. Our system started detecting a cluster of signals that didn’t neatly fit any predefined category. Customers weren’t searching for a specific product. They were expressing a vibe.
That vibe was Country Chic.
Now, Country Chic isn’t a product type. It’s an aspiration. It’s a wax jacket, a Harrington, a quilted parka - products scattered across the catalogue that no single category would ever unite.
We assembled those products into a collection, interpreted what the customer was really reaching for, and dropped it into the nav as a curated theme.
That’s the difference between listing products and curating for an aspiration.
Your catalogue is organised around how your business works. A real hero nav is organised around how your customer thinks.
We All Need a New Hero.
If you want your hero nav to earn its name, it needs a higher calling.
A real hero doesn’t show up and start talking about themselves. They listen. They figure out what’s needed before they charge in.
The nav that Neiman Marcus deployed with FoundIt! is a good example of what this looks like in practice. Over 200,000 products, optimised through intent signals, resulting in a +2.1% increase in conversion rate and a -2.2% drop in bounce rate.
Not because they pushed harder. Because they started listening harder.
As Lyndsey Cates, Group Director of Product at Neiman Marcus, put it: “In-store, we curate selections and guide customers personally. Online, we lose that human touch. FoundIt! keeps the experience focused on the customers, not our catalogue.”
Stop thinking like a market trader trying to shift overstock. Start thinking like the guide that makes an overwhelming range feel simple, intuitive, and built for them.
Because that’s what a real hero does.
Three Actions for E-commerce Directors
If you’ve read this far and you’re wondering whether your hero nav is working for your customers or just working for your trading team, here are three things to do this week:
1. Audit what’s actually driving your nav decisions right now.
Pull up the last three months of nav changes. For each one, ask: was this driven by customer signal - search data, click behaviour, conversion trends, or by a meeting? If the answer is mostly the latter, you now know where the gap is.
The first step to fixing this is admitting the nav has been an internal broadcasting tool, not a customer-listening one.
2. Test whether your nav moves when demand moves.
Find a category where you’re seeing a spike in search or engagement right now - something trending this week. Check whether your nav reflects it. If it doesn’t, and you’d have to hold a meeting to make it happen, you’ve got a lag problem. Your nav should be responsive in near real time.
Demand doesn’t wait for your Monday morning standup.
3. Find your ‘Country Chic’.
Look at your search data and ask: are customers using language, themes, or concepts that cut across your catalogue in ways your categories don’t capture? Vibes, use cases, lifestyle moments - ‘morning routine,’ ‘country weekend,’ ‘beach wedding.’
These are the collections your nav is missing. Not because the products aren’t there - they almost certainly are - but because no one has assembled them around the idea the customer is actually shopping for.
Warren Cowan is CEO of FoundIt! , the intent-led commerce platform for large retailers. FoundIt! helps brands like M&S, B&Q, John Lewis. Saks Global, Neiman Marcus, and Michael Kors make every product findable by closing the gap between how customers search and how catalogues are organised.