Westfield London partners with Nextatlas on ‘store of the future’
Westfield London has opened the doors to The Trending Store, pitched as the UK’s first ever AI powered fashion boutique. In partnership with Save the Children, this will be available from 3rd to 7th July, stocking 100 items based on what’s trending across social media in real-time.
As we reported last week, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield has partnered with Nextatlas for this initiative. Tapping machine learning tech, the latter says that it is able to predict breaking trends before they happen by monitoring over three billion data points from 400,000+ ‘trend innovators’ globally, analysing both visual and text content from social media sources. This data is then fed into a team of stylists, who will be sourcing items on demand from retailers in Westfield London including Topshop, Reiss, Whistles, Lindex and Stuart Weitzman. Each of the trends will be presented through mood boards and insights on Ultra HD screens provided by LG.
The store also features smart vending machines, supplied by Social Vend, where customers can tap to donate to win prizes from Westfield stores. “We aim to bring the newest concepts, first to the market brands and best experiences to our customers. Through our How We Shop Research platform we know that shoppers increasingly want to experience both online and offline retail in a seamless journey,” says Myf Ryan, CMO Europe and Group Director of Brand and Strategic Marketing at Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield.
“Online, shoppers are inspired by influencers and used to being guided by AI, with products served to them based on their behaviour. Usually this guidance does not translate to a physical retail space, however, working with data analysts, Nextatlas, we are able to bring our shoppers products that are trending in real-time - a true reflection of social conversation brought to life in a physical space.”
Mario Coletti, Managing Director at Nextatlas, comments: “This is the first time we’ve used our data in a physical setting and so it’s amazing to see how the platform has come to life at The Trending Store. It’s a pioneering way to demonstrate how AI will be relevant in physical retail for years to come. Our platform monitors trend creators, analysing visual content, hash tags and captions on a daily basis to project the trends of the future.”