The Retail PlannerOctober 2014 - The Retail Planner

Phy-gital Beauty

October 15, 2014 / alison

Beauty brands are going all out to gather consumer data via digital and interactive content platforms, designed to enhance an ever-personalised experience both in-store and online. From on-counter smart mirrors and face-mapping programmes, to apps that allow you to colour-match before you buy, the beauty industry is embracing a more intuitive, digital journey to purchase.

‘Digital is going to boost the business of beauty,’ L’Oreal chairman Jean-Paul Agon said in an interview with Bloomberg in Paris. ‘We think it’s going to change everything.’

Content-to-Commerce

As retailers launch their own content platforms and mimic traditional media channels, beauty brands are following suit. Over the last few months, we have seen some of the industry’s biggest names launch editorial platforms that serve to engage and inform consumers with 360 degree brand-centric content.

Sephora’s user curated Beauty Board

After Sephora created its own user-generated content site The Beauty Board, beauty conglomerates such as Estée Lauder and L’Oreal are creating online brand destinations, taking readers and their valuable data with them.

L’Oreal is the latest to talk about its online content initiative. The French beauty giant unpacked the business strategy behind its new content-to-commerce ‘luxury digital flagship’ (online) stores at the World Retail Congress (WRC) conference in Paris last month. According to Internet Retailing, a re-focused direct-to-consumer e-commerce strategy will help the beauty conglomerate boost its annual direct e-commerce revenues to €300m in 2016 from €250m.

‘It’s not the digital revolution it’s the customer journey evolution,’ Vincent Stuhlen, global head of digital at L’Oréal Luxe told the WRC audience at a breakfast briefing. Customers are choosing to shop on their devices wherever they are, L’Oreal is simply putting itself in the right place, he said.

‘Our digital flagship strategy places the customer at the heart of the shopping experience; we want them to explore our brands and have the ultimate journey of discovery. We are testing the shopability of our content all the time – ideally with the aim of allowing customers to buy in just one click,’ he explained.

For L’Oreal Luxe, the digital flagship brand stores (including Giorgio Armani, YSL Beaute, Lancôme, Kiehls, Shu Uemera among others), have been created for ‘personalised brand-to-customer relationship building’, through understanding user cookies, said Stuhlen.

For example the Lancôme site is a digital branded experience for consumers who are ‘influencers’. The content-commerce platform sells direct to customers; it’s editorial driven and the customer curates their own page. They can get rewards from purchases, are encouraged to personalise their page and share their choices on social media, Stuhlen said.

In the summer, Estée Lauder launched its biggest online content platform to date, The Estée Edit. The daily news and inspiration site features editorial from Estée Lauder spokespeople and industry collaborators such as French blogger, Garance Doré or model Joan Smalls. The content resembles a lifestyle magazine with posts across food, culture, music and fashion as well as business-led profiles of successful entrepreneurs. Celebrity guest posts work well on the site too. There have been spikes in readers following product reviews by Dore, or a three-day editorship by Smalls. There is a ‘shop the story’ section at the end of each article that links to Estée Lauder’s product-driven e-commerce site.

The Estee Edit Kendall Jenner and Joan Smalls

The Estee Edit with Kendall Jenner and Joan Smalls

This collaborative content-to-commerce strategy is a smart one for the brand. According to the L2 Digital IQ Index , Estée Lauder has the fourth largest e-commerce presence in the US, UK, France, and China combined (after Bobbi Brown, Clarins and Clinique).

The Estée Edit was created for readers to share content across social media and make the brand relevant in a digital world. ‘Blogging has always been a way for me to express myself creatively and practice telling stories,’ Helane Crowell executive director of online global communications at Estée Lauder told the Business of Fashion. ‘Storytelling is essential for personal social channels and even more so for brands. All of these platforms bring us closer [to brands] and with this intimacy comes a desire for authenticity and access.’

Augmenting beauty

Back to L’Oreal and its digital push to engage with consumers. Coinciding with the Cannes Film Festival in May, the French giant launched its Makeup Genius App, as a way for its customers to try out more products on themselves, wherever they are via mobile and without even visiting a beauty counter.

L’Oreal’s Makeup Genius app

The app utilizes the front facing camera on smartphones and through facial mapping technology, the app can augment a range of L’Oreal’s key seasonal colour products and spokesmodel’s key looks onto the users face. If a shopper is using the app at a L’Oreal counter there are also products that can be scanned to instantly test the virtual looks. The 3D virtual mirror works by mapping 64 facial points and can be seen from whatever angle the user tilts their head and in real time. L’Oreal harvests data from every Makeup Genius session and if users like their new look, they can both buy the items directly via the app’s built-in shopping cart and snap selfies to share across social media or reference when applying the products in real life.

‘The reason why we started it is we see the beauty consumer has changed in terms of what they actually want in a product and an experience,’ Guive Balooch, global director of L’Oreal’s Connected Beauty Incubator told the New York Times. ‘We are moving more and more toward service, personalization and customization.’

Sephora is usually ahead of the curve when it comes to trying out new technology in stores. In June the retailer partnered with Modiface to trial 3D facial-recognition mirrors in its Milan flagship that simulate how cosmetics products will look on a shopper’s face from multiple perspectives. Users tap a touchscreen display to try different colours and looks, then save the results for trying out at home or purchasing in-store.

Modiface Sephora virtual mirror Rome store

Sephora’s virtual mirror by Modiface, Rome store

If augmenting beauty looks onto shoppers’ faces via ‘try-before-you-buy’ apps is becoming the norm, perhaps we are not far off a more creative, virtual approach. We might see consumers booking data-driven face-mapping sessions similar to that shown in this beauty video from Project Omote by Japanese artist Nobumichi Asai.

Data-mining

Not content with creating a suite of virtual make-over, anti-aging and photo-enhancing beauty apps, as well as working with Sephora, Modiface is going one step further with a new data-driven Beautiful Me app.

Beautiful Me app by Modiface

The app works in conjunction with users’ Facebook photos and scans 500 of their images to determine skin tone, then makes product recommendations. Instead of basic analysis of a single photo, the Beautiful Me app gives people a much more accurate description of their skin profile, through the combination of big data and machine-learning algorithms, says Miriam Pettinen, ModiFace director of partnerships and mobile strategy for Beautiful Me.

When you mix analytics-based algorithms with personal preferences you should get near-perfect product suggestions. That’s the strategy behind BeautyDNA a new subscription-based online matchmaking service similar to music or TV streaming services such as Pandora and Netflix.

Beauty DNA

‘BeautyDNA is a game changer in that it will evolve how women discover beauty products,’ said Adam Sandow, founder of the site. Dubbed ‘the Pandora of beauty’, the site uses analytics to match consumers with brands that match their skin or haircare needs. ‘It will empower women so that they aren’t making the same beauty mistakes time and time again. Imagine a warehouse full of thousands of products, it’s completely overwhelming. One person comes and hands you a box of the perfect products for you from that warehouse — that is BeautyDNA,’ he told Women’s Wear Daily.

After three years of supplying beauty junkies with samples via a monthly subscription, online retailer Birchbox decided to experiment with a physical store that opened this summer in New York. With over 300,000 regular customers the company had enough preferences data to merchandise the store with online bestsellers and chose to position products by category not brand. Birchbox joint-CEOs Katia Beauchamp and Hayley Barna told Fortune magazine, that visitors to the store have taken to inputting their personal data via an interactive screen to generate their own Birchbox product recommendations, which they can either buy in-store or create an account for their own instant subscription.

Birchbox New York flagship store

Clinique is the latest beauty brand to combine data-mining and store design with its new 700 sq ft pop-up retail concept called the Great Skin Lab. Billed as a digital experience that will guide consumers through a ‘day in the life of their skin’, the Covent Garden store houses interactive pods and a moisturising station, where shoppers answer a series of questions on their lifestyle to determine their future skincare needs. Along with fellow Estee-Lauder owned brand, Bobbi Brown and its personalised selling techniques at the new Studio flagship that has opened just next door, the area is fast becoming known as London’s Beauty Quarter.

Clinique Great Skin Lab store, Covent Garden

While consumers are still wary of brands using their data to advertise products at them, Unilever’s All Things Hair YouTube channel has done much to change that since it launched in late 2013. The dedicated hair channel features vloggers’ ‘how-to’ tutorials and was developed as a way to analyse consumer search data from Google or YouTube. Through mining the search data, vloggers create and deliver highly relevant content using products from the Unilever brand portfolio (Dove, Toni & Guy, V05). Described by Unilever as a way to predict the next hair trends, the channel now has more than 132,000 subscribers. When the campaign won an award at this year’s Cannes Lions advertising festival, Unilever CMO Keith Weed said: ‘The content is relevant, useful and authentic. It’s a really cool application of big data, based on what is actually big insights’.

Unilever’s All Things Hair Youtube channel

Through dedicated social platforms or augmented reality ‘try-before-you buy’ apps, beauty brands and retailers are able to mine consumer preferences then generate hyper-personalised product recommendations. As the beauty industry introduces ever more compelling reasons to harvest big data, it adds up to consumers getting more of what they want, how they want it and when they want it.
For more on the future of beauty see Disney Roller Girl’s coverage of The Future Laboratory’s Beauty Futures forum:

From runway to retail

October 9, 2014 / alison

Now-commerce is here courtesy of fashion designers and retailers forging ever-closer partnerships to sell socially savvy fashionistas the newest collections now.

Moschino Barbie at La Rinascente, Milan

Watching the SS15 Moschino show live-stream from Milan last month, you could be forgiven for getting caught up in the saccharine pink, baby-doll Barbie bubble. Orchistrated by maverick designer Jeremy Scott, this show (and overly branded capsule collection), was a #MFW moment that will have a sell by date of roughly one month. Blink and you might miss it. But not if retailers Nordstrom, Selfridges and La Rinascente had anything to do with it. These retailers all started promoting and selling the Barbie line hours after the show (aided by all the Instagram photos showing Anna Della Russo and Cara Delevigne cavorting around in the pieces at the post-show party). Welcome to the era of insta-ready runway collections available to buy now.

Julien David at Colette, Paris

Moschino isn’t the only one leaning on its retail partners for instant runway sales. Colette continues to play the role of retail mentor by showcasing its favourite Paris designers in its window on the same day the labels show on the runways. With a simple poster message to order online for pre-season delivery, customers could snaffle the new SS15 pieces by Julien David and JW Anderson for Loewe almost as the shows finished.

DSM 10th anniversary Louis Vuitton window

Dover Street Market is another pre-season sale protagonist. As part of its 10^th anniversary last month, the luxury store hosted the first ‘ephemeral’ boutique for Nicholas Ghesquiere’s debut collection for Louis Vuitton a full month before the collection hit elsewhere.

Ghesquiere Louis Vuitton preview at DSM AW14, London

Colette was also at the centre of the pre-order hullabaloo of the new Apple Watch, previewing for one day only on 30 September in the window and in-store, complete with guest appearance by designers Jony Ives and Marc Newson. Timed to coincide with Paris Fashion Week, this launch was a sure-fire indicator of the luxe-fash-tech appeal for Apple’s much-anticipated new wearable device.

The traditional bi-annual fashion season cycle is now a thing of the past. Designer brands are responding to the ‘want-it-now’ culture of social-media driven commerce and delivering fast-fashion as it happens. And the power of digital is democratizing exclusive collections, from luxury fashion to high-end tech – proving e-commerce and physical stores can work in harmony together

This report first appeared on Unique Style Platform: From runway to retail

World Retail Congress 2014: part three, Internet of Things & following Millennials

October 4, 2014 / alison

Millennials and disruptive retail were the two key themes at this year’s World Retail Congress, with one arguably driving the other forward.

Selfie-commerce

Self-expression is at the centre of the now ubiquitous user generated content on social media. Millennials or consumers aged 18-24, now make up a third of all posts tagged selfie.

In a session looking at how retailers need to respond to connected consumes coming of age, WGSN’s retail editor Angela Rumsey highlighted brands that have embraced selfie culture. Examples included New Balance’s partnership with visual culture platform Olapic that saw 6000 tagged images for its collaboration with Heidi Klum. Adidas used the idea of millennials engaging in self-expressive video-making for its #UniteAllOriginals mobile app in China. Ugg focused on tweens for a iPad Touch campaign generating 17.6m views and driving in-store sales. Other retailers joining the Selfie social-commerce bandwagon included: French Connection, Karl Lagerfeld, Vero Moda and Zappos, according to Rumsey.

French Connection Cant Help My Selfie

Rumsey also earmarked Twitter and Facebook ‘buy now’ buttons and Snapchat’s closed loop selling messages, as social-commerce strategies to watch.

For sustainable fashion focused e-commerce start-up Zady, transparency and storytelling drive the 12-month-old site’s content strategy. ‘We ask our customers via social media what products to develop. We want to hear their voice reflected on the site,’ says Maxine Bédat, the co-founder of Zady.

‘Our social content is based on storytelling, connecting to consumers on different levels, it’s a halo effect around the brand,’ she explains. Zady content and articles reflect the DNA of the brand with work-life balance or product history articles giving people something to think about. Bédat says, the shorter the content the better. ‘It’s about concise articles that resonate with our customer and how they share them,’ she adds.

Zady pop-up shop

Following millennials

Millennials are the most influential consumer group and brands that want to sell to them need to recognize just how discerning and judgemental they really are, says Maryleigh Bliss, editor and strategy consultant at youth trends agency YPulse.

‘Millennials are incredibly diverse and have to see themselves reflected in the way they are advertised to. They are quickly usurping the baby boomers,’ she said in a keynote address. Not only are they buying more than boomers – according to Bliss, they will have a spending power of $2.45tr by 2020 – they want to buy stuff now, instantly and without waiting.

‘Mobile phones are ubiquitous, with the majority of millennials checking them more than six times an hour. Around 70% have already made a purchase on their phone,’ says Bliss. Millennials operate in a visual culture, they want to see not read, which is why the Liketoknow.it app is a missing link for brands on Instagram, she says.

This group respects disruptive creativity, says Bliss. ‘They express rebellion through everyday acts, such as aligning with brands and companies that reflect change, it’s a purposeful rebellion that allows them to manipulate older systems to fit a newer millennial world view,’ she says. Citing brands such as Warby Parker, Naked Wines, Boycott and Toms as millennials favourites, Bliss says they are popular because they take a stand. ‘It’s about control, they want to orchestrate an everyday middleman backlash that supports new ways of thinking. 66% of millennials think they have the power to change things in the real world through online noise, with 67% buying into ‘rebellious’ brands,’ says Bliss.

Warby Parker

Combine this activist mindset with impatience and brands wanting to reach millennials need to have seamless retail operations. She says retailers need to think about a strategy around the millennial mantra: ‘Ain’t nobody got time for that.’

‘We are seeing this expressed through the rise in one-button ordering,’ says Bliss, who name-checks brands such as Uber, Push Me Pizza and Everlane for its delivery partnership with Postmates. ‘Millennials can get so much online, what retailers need to think about is how they can provide something more. Embracing this generation requires a different set of tools, you have to show them who you are, where they are,’ she says.

Everlane’s transparent manufacturing campaign

Internet of Things

Technology is recasting everything from smartphones and tablets to physical stores, pointing towards the way consumers will live in an age full of the Internet of Things (IoT).

‘We can see how technology is changing consumers’ lives,’ says Adam Williams, retail development director Samsung Electronics. ‘By 2020 we expect 26bn connected devices comprising 7.3bn smartphones and 19bn others,’ he says.

The IoT will have the most affect in consumers’ homes, for example across connected kitchen appliances and out-of-the-box smart home management systems. According to Williams, there will be 45bn smart devices installed in homes by 2018 worth $100bn. ‘This is the start of an integrated developer community, making the most of what the IoT can do.’

Samsung’s vision of buying a fridge, Internet of Things at BestBuy

Williams cites an example of how the IoT looks in a retail environment today as a Samsung fridge buying experience at Best Buy in the US. A 6x6ft wall-to-wall digital experience shows customers what the connected home looks like after inputting their data. ‘It’s a test retail environment to bring the interactive experience to life,’ says Williams.

World Retail Congress 2014: part two, 50/50 retail & disruptive devices

October 3, 2014 / alison

In an age where best-practice omnichannel is driving digital change in the retail landscape, the old rules no longer apply. Disruption and challenging the old guard were key themes at this year’s World Retail Congress conference.

50:50 retail

The future of retail is digital integration says Tony Stockhil, CEO of Javelin Group, an omnichannel strategy firm that held a lunchtime session in partnership with Samsung.

Since the merger of PC world with Currys Electricals, that business is now 80% digital first, he says with others following swiftly behind – 80% at Halfords, 65% at Tesco and at Argos, where there has been a substantial investment into the digital first customer journey.

Argos by Dalziel & Pow

Over the last few years digital shopping has been buoyed by the growth in tablets, while desktop and laptop sales are in decline. ‘But smartphone growth is nascent. The focus for retailers is to target convenience led purchases as well as loyalty,’ says Stockhil. Retailers should do this by ramping up time and place promotions via consumers’ smartphones while they are in-store.

A new fulfillment strategy is key to making physical and digital work in harmony. Click and Collect is at the centre of this. Utilising the store for fulfillment of customer orders improves on speed and service – and it’s why major US stores such as Walmart, Target and Gap are all developing stores as fulfillment hubs, explains Stockhil.

‘Stores provide a platform for speed of delivery that pure players cannot match,’ adds Henri Seroux, managing director continental Europe for Manhattan Associates, a consulting firm.

Retailers are changing formats to serve the customer where they are. ‘IKEA in Hamburg is a smaller, denser, urban location, signaling the death of out-of-town big box,’ says Stockhil. Ikea knows this after launching its ‘Life at Home’ big data campaign across eight global cities in mid-2014. This is a good example of how a retailer can be nimble and use data to inform new strategy.

Ikea Life at Home ad campaign

Physical stores are an asset in the war against online pure players, aka Amazon. If they are to compete effectively with online, stores need to leverage their bricks and mortar portfolio and create service opportunities that distinguish them apart from Amazon, says Woolworths business transformation director Julie Coates. ‘We have perhaps been too robotic about the customer experience,’ she says. ‘We need to leverage the advantages of the touch and feel, and experience we can bring to food.’

Eataly, Milan

Continuous shopping

The way technology has become engrained in everything we do has created a paradigm shift in the way people shop. This ‘once in a lifetime’ change in consumer habits, is a clear indication that continuous computing leads to continuous shopping, says Google vice president of product management, shopping sroducts, Sameer Samat.

‘Continuous connection means continuous shopping. It makes shopping trips shorter, and there is no longer the need for multiple store visits to research products,’ he says. In the US, shopper footfall has seen a decline of 55%, yet sales went up, so consumers are arriving at stores much better informed he says.

‘Where we are going is personalized shopping – with Google as a connector between store and consumer,’ he says.

Samat cites Google Express as a catalyst for hyper-connected shopping. The same day delivery service has been trialing in the US for just over a year. ‘For connectedness, it is about being where the customer is,’ he says. ‘In most cases our retail partners have the product within four miles of the consumer, so the innovation lies in getting it to them,’ he says. Google Express has encouraged the company to shift from plus mobile, to mobile first. ‘In the past we tried to develop for mobile, now we start with it,’ he adds.

Disruptive devices: the new normal

With 5bn people expected by be online by 2020 and 15bn by 2025, big data will undoubtedly influence consumers’ lifestyles, says Peter Fitzgerald, Google’s head of UK retail.

He predicts a future where connected devices and wearables will be doing the ‘heavy lifting’ of day-to-day activities, letting consumers live their lives more seamlessly.

Google is experimenting with physical retail and continues to roll out shop-in-shops at technology partner stores such as Saturn in Germany, Dixons in the UK and Best Buy in the US. Fitzgerald describes the Google retail concept as focused on the power of cross channel, where consumers can test drive Chromebooks, Nexus tablets and even Google’s multi-screen Liquid Galaxy experience, where the most popular activity is to zoom in and check home addresses via the Google Earth app. This is a 360 degree brand experience in every sense.

Google Liquid Galaxy

Great experience in a store will never change says Fitzgerald. ‘The smartphone will become like an assistant, it will enable consumers to have a richer experience in stores, – 80% of smartphone users look for local information,’ he says.

‘Consumers with mobiles in-store have more purposeful shopping experiences now,’ says Natalie Berg global research director at Planet Retail. She says the trend for showrooming has developed into what retailers are calling ‘boomeranging’, where consumers research a purchase online, go into a physical store to see and touch it while price comparing, then make a final purchase online for delivery at home. ‘This is where the idea of seamless continuity throughout the shopping journey, becomes even more important to retailers,’ she adds.

Synergy retail

In an era of omnichannel, retailers need to offer consumers more synergy: cross-selling and cross-service.

‘In the UK we are seeing world leading examples of future thinking retail partnerships. For example Dixons merger with Carphone Warehouse indicates their combined understanding of new markets, bridging consumer electronics with smartphones, says Samsung’s Williams.

There is opportunity in this joint omnichannel business model, where both parties are required to share data, insights and analysis to move forward into new ground.

Symbiotic partnerships are the future of omnichannel, concurs Javelin Group’s Stockhill. Citing recent collaborations between eBay and Argos, River Island and ASOS, Asda and B&Q – retailers are turning to more flexible ways of working with competitors. ‘Retailers are embracing digital to drive change at the core, CEOs need to be evangelists of change and create a 50:50 predictive, data-driven store where consumer service is key and the future of integrated digital practice becomes more apparent,’ says Stockhil.

eBay collection points at Argos stores

At another session on connected consumers, it is a clever cross-selling loyalty campaign that is cited as a winning digital strategy. ‘At Walgreens omnichannel customers are spending six times more than single channel customers,’ says Danis Dorval, VP EMEA sales at digital strategy firm Apigee. By focusing on loyalty promotions across photo-printing, pharmacy, cosmetics, food and convenience, the store has accrued 72m additional customers through a connected channel strategy.

World Retail Congress 2014: part one, big data & experience economy

October 2, 2014 / alison

‘The future of shopping is personalized discovery’. That was the closing remark from Nicolas Franchet, global head of retail and e-commerce strategy at Facebook, who summed up this year’s World Retail Congress (WRC) ‘big data’ theme in a nutshell.

Disruption in the retail landscape, and Millennials – the consumer group most likely to cause it – were the official themes at this year’s WRC conference, now in its 8^th year. As Samsung Electronics joined Mastercard and Deloitte as co-sponsors, the topic of disruptive technology and digital shopping behavior was top of the agenda across the board.

World Retail Congress 2014 Ann Cairns, Mastercard

‘Innovation and new technology bring a type of disruption to the online and offline retail experience that puts the shopper in control like never before,’ says Ann Cairns, president international markets at Mastercard. ‘We know what we want, when and how we want it and we expect retailers to understand these needs, accommodate them, and know how to deliver experiences and environments that make life and shopping simple, secure and relevant,’ she explains at the opening day’s session called ‘The future is now, are you ready?’

Big data:

Now that contactless payments are available on the London (and New York) transport systems, Mastercard’s data can help retailers understand the entire journey to purchase, says Cairns. ‘Mobile payments are likely to grow exponentially across the massive reach that card networks afford. This is indicated by early and high-speed adoption of contactless,’ she says. Adding to the trend is Apple Pay that just launched in September, with similar contactless payment responses likely from Google, Samsung and other technology companies keen to join the dots for consumers to enjoy seamless transactions at convenience retail locations, she adds. Contactless has quickly become a loyalty battle war among banks, that are keen to offer both existing and new customers incentives to use the service.

Mastercard Contactless by McCann Erickson

However security issues around smartphone payments are growing. ‘Now consumers are concerned with security, the public wants to have a safety net around their online shopping behaviour, it’s key to the global growth of mobile payments,’ says Cairns.

Apple Pay

Department stores do digital

Paolo de Cesare, CEO of French luxury department store chain Printemps says that in the luxury department store sector – where physical retail theatre reigns supreme – e-commerce has become increasingly important due to increasing numbers of overseas customers.

‘From gathering purchase data to personalised relationships, we want to deliver superior service and advice in-store. Through our data we have seen age demographics broken down, for example we know our millennials and boomers shop next to each other, so now we cater to mother and daughter shopping together.

‘Through providing ‘meet the designer’ experiences for VIPs with the likes of Roland Mouret or Victoria Beckham, we can achieve highly personal shopping services,’ he says. Printemps is also building on its co-branded promotions with luxury partners Dior, Chanel, Baccarat, Prada for seasonal campaigns. Personalised e-commerce is the future of omnichannel at Printemps, he says.

Victoria Beckham shop-in-shop at Printemps, Paris

Experience economy

‘Experience per square foot is our mantra,’ says Rachel Schechtman, CEO and founder of ‘advertorial’ boutique Story in New York. She says stores that will resonate in the future, will not be about consumerism, they will offer customers immersion and experiences that surprise and delight.

Schechtman says that being ‘tactile and serving the community’ is more important than working to traditional metrics such as sales per sq ft. She does this by providing a regularly changing assortment of brands, start-ups and sponsorship platforms that are more like partnerships, describing the store’s role as a matchmaker between brand and consumers. ‘We are democratizing the store experience, we want to replicate reading a magazine with new content for our customers all the time.

Story has hosted a number of co-branded ‘experiences’, including a men’s grooming event with Details Magazine, where customers spent an average of 20 minutes playing with the Gilette-sponsored virtual scuba-dive table courtesy of digital VM specialist Perch Design.

Details ‘his’ collaboration at Story, New York

Experiential designer appearances also resonate for the ‘living press release’ idea of storytelling at Story, says Schechtman. Highlights have included a General Electric 3D printing event when Rebecca Minkoff arrived to 3D print and etch one of her handbags, and a pitch night event with Beth Macri debuting her jewellery line that led her to doing ‘Made in America’ on eBay with Martha Stewart. Pitch nights from local artisans are now a regular monthly event, drawing crowds eager to learn about new designers.

Schechtman will live and die by the store experience, but she adds, ‘if experience is so important to retail, make e-commerce an extension of the journey in-store.’

Future Fashion: mentoring retail-tech talent with Decoded at Westfield London

October 1, 2014 / alison

Everyone’s got an app in them right? Now I’m tempted……

Last weekend shopping mall operator Westfield partnered with digital start-up specialist Decoded Fashion for a 24-hour app hackathon, a first for a UK mall.

Liz Bacelar of Decoded Fashion at Westfield’s Hackathon

Held in the mall’s central atrium, teams of amateur coders joined forces with industry experts and mentors to answer Westfield’s brief: to create an app that either allows shoppers to find the perfect item, make the right beauty choice through data, or simply ensures visitors feel happier while they’re shopping (?!)

Westfield Hackathon: an app developer pitches using visual data

60 brave volunteers, split into 17 teams took part in the Hackathon. Sleep didn’t seem to bother most of them, and after some serious mentorship from Decoded founder Liz Bacelor as well as representatives from Google, Twitter, ASOS, All Saints, Samsung and Westfield’s marketing director Myf Ryan, the results were largely functional and fun.

There were two standouts for me:

Tagstyle – an app that allows users to discover fashion choices through social media. By taking a photo of a product, for example a pair of jeans, and scanning the barcode then uploading the picture to social media, users can generate curated hashtags and retailers can learn what products are trending,. They can follow up with promotions around key products and the user gets instant feedback on what to purchase. I like this because it is useful for both consumer and retailer, and plugs a whole in the social-commerce world where there is currently a gap.

Here’s a video of the Tagstyle team talking about their app:

Shelf It – This platform creates a universal shopping cart for all Westfield’s retail brands. Users can scan bar codes on products they are interested in, and swipe Tinder-style to like for click and collect later.

‘The app caters for consumers’ tendencies to showroom, or snap products to remember, then compare prices later,’ explains Karinna Nobbs, one of the team behind ShelfIt and a senior lecturer at London College of Fashion. ‘Retailers are moving from bar code scanning to image recognition software and this app works to aid consumers’ memories for what they have liked on their shopping journey. It’s sharable across social media and the app can provide data around ‘abandoned shopping carts’ (a holy grail in retail),’ she says. I love this app for its universal appeal and blueprint for a business model that can be used in other multiple retail situations.

Karinna Nobbs of London College of Fashion presenting Shelf It

UPDATE: Karinna told me she is looking at taking this app to market today! Now for that angel investor…..

And the best of the rest found common ground in addressing issues such as better informed styling through personal data capture or navigation around the mall so consumers can find exactly what they are looking for. I hope the teams behind the apps called ‘Hummingbird’, ‘ShopCloud’ and ‘SnapSale’ have logged their APIs!

The team behind SkipQ were the Hackathon winners. The app allows customers to queue jump in certain stores after scanning their product to cancel any security tag and pay via their app instead of at the till. (We are getting closer to a time when the cash-wrap till will no longer exist). The team of three won a trip to Westifield Labs in San Francisco to refine and bring their app to market.

Alongside the brain frazzling coding going on in the Hackathon space, Westfield had installed an immersive tech zone in its atrium. This was my favourite bit! All that retail-ready tech to play with was like a little bit of CES (Consumer Electronics Show) had just landed all the way from Las Vegas.

Inquisitive browsers didn’t hold back playing with all the apps and devices that after wider adoption in the mainstream, could well transform the interactive retail journey.

The station dedicated to L’Oreal’s Makeup Genius app was particularly busy, showcasing how you could match make-up colours to your skin tone via augmented reality on iPads. Then there was the projection-based Displair tool that allows visuals to be displayed on a steady stream of air. The idea of gesture recognition software was brought to life at the Leap Motion stand as passersby could control a screen with a pinch or mid-air swipe of their hand. Google Glass sets were also being demonstrated, and plenty of people (including the hackers) got to try the still glitchy wearable everyone is talking about. Chic bracelets by Q Designs were on display, showing how they masquerade as smartphone chargers. CuteCircuit put on a mini-fashion show and a live demonstration that asked the audience to tweet words that could be shown via the company’s smart fabrics, here seen on clutch handbags and dresses. And lastly, after all the hullabaloo around Facebook’s purchase of Ocolus Rift earlier this year, virtual reality hardware seems to be on everyone’s mind. So interesting to see vrAse headsets on hand to show users what it’s like to turn your smart phone into a VR headset and experience movies, games or branded worlds.

Through mentorship platforms such as Decoded and the showcase spectacle of a Westfield mall, it is refreshing to see how coding your own app is not so scary and surprisingly achievable if you put your mind to it. Smartphones have changed the physical shopping experience beyond recognition, now consumers are in the driving seat for the next wave of wearables or interactive tech that will take digitally enhanced retail to the next level.

The Retail Planner

Retail + Digital

Monthly Archives: October 2014