October 2022: retail technology deals and deployments at a glance
RTIH rounds up the stand out retail systems deals, deployments and pilots from October, including Amazon, Circle K,SHEIN, Walmart, Boots, Hugo Boss, Sam’s Club, and Flipkart.
Amazon
Amazon is continuing its excursion into physical fashion retail.
The company has opened a second Amazon Style store, with the aim of combining the personalisation of e-commerce with the immediacy of bricks and mortar shopping.
This is located at Easton Town Center in Columbus, Ohio.
Amazon debuted the concept earlier this year at The Americana at Brand, in Glendale, California.
Circle K
Circle K has selected The ai Corporation’s payments platform, aiEazyFuel, to power its B2B mobile payments app, Circle K PRO.
This enables business customers to pay for their fuel and other products via the app.
Using ai’s technology, Circle K can authorise, and process transactions initiated from the driver's mobile device.
The platform will offer Circle K a range of issuing, acceptance, processing, and billing functions.
After a pilot, Circle K PRO is now available to business customers in the company’s core markets in the Scandinavian and the Baltic regions.
Hugo Boss
Hugo Boss has enlisted Adobe to power its strategy around 3D and immersive design.
“To support our vision of becoming the leading premium tech driven fashion platform worldwide, we were one of the early companies to explore the potential of 3D and immersive design in fashion,” says Sebastian Berg, Vice President, Business Operations Excellence at Hugo Boss.
“Now we have over 400 employees working with these innovative tools to produce more inspiring and sustainable products, and to lead our industry in digital.”
“With Adobe Substance 3D as part of our Adobe Creative Cloud stack, we have a powerful tool that provides hyper realistic renderings of our products. It gives us greater speed in responding to global consumer trends, while helping us experiment with new digital services to drive 3D innovation in fashion.”
Boots
Boots has partnered with RangeMe to expand the number of new and diverse suppliers it works with on a goods for resale basis both in-store and online.
With over 200,000 suppliers already registered on the platform, the retailer hopes that the RangeMe tie up will be a portal to working with the very best new and emerging brands.
Sam’s Club
Sam’s Club, a division of Walmart, has announced the completion of a US, chain wide roll-out of Inventory Scan towers that have been added to its existing fleet of robotic scrubbers in partnership with Brain Corp.
The deployment was initiated in late January 2022 and has resulted in Brain Corp claiming the title of world’s leading supplier of robotic inventory scanners.
Walmart
Walmart has announced the launch of a new platform designed around creators.
Walmart Creator is pitched as a one stop portal that makes it easy for the latter to monetise shoppable products from the retailer.
In a press release, Walmart says that those who sign up will have “access to tens of thousands of products and are given the opportunity to earn revenue all while earning commissions on sales they refer with no cap”.
Users of the platform can share product links to any social platform or group of their choice, receive product recommendations based on interests and affinities, and collect performance data to help grow their community and following.
Flipkart
Flipkart has launched a metaverse offering for consumers to more interactively discover and shop new products on its app.
The Walmart backed Indian e-commerce giant has partnered with eDAO, a Polygon incubated firm, to launch Flipverse.
This is in the pilot stage and will be available on Flipkart’s newly launched platform, FireDrops.
Brands including Puma, Noise, Nivea, Lavie, Tokyo Talkies, Campus, VIP, Ajmal Perfumes, Himalaya, and Butterfly India will be participating in the first edition.
Phase one of Flipverse is an Android only experience, and will be live for a week.
SHEIN
Chinese fast fashion giant, SHEIN, has announced the launch of SHEIN Exchange, an online peer-to-peer resale destination.
The firm says that, over the past years, through community created Facebook groups and social platforms, its customers have communicated an interest in buying and selling previously owned SHEIN products without the high platform fees that they are usually required to pay.
Available via the SHEIN app, a pilot version of SHEIN Exchange is currently available in the US.
Sainsbury’s
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is working with Sainsbury’s as the UK grocery giant looks to accelerate its cloud first strategy.
TCS has been a strategic partner to Sainsbury’s for over a decade.
As a part of a new multi-year deal, it will consolidate and modernise the retailer’s IT infrastructure landscape into a hybrid cloud stack using TCS Enterprise Cloud.
It will also provide end-to-end managed services for workplace services, network connectivity, and security.
River Island
River Island is working with Scandit as part of its plans to modernise store operations.
The UK high street fashion retailer has issued each store associate a Scandit enabled Samsung Galaxy XCover rugged smartphone, equipped with Microsoft Teams, to replace shared hardware-based scanning devices.
It says that the Scandit Smart Data Capture platform unlocks a range of functionalities for it to improve workflows, introduce new services and empower store associates to uplift the overall customer experience.
A.S. Watson
Health and beauty retailer, A.S. Watson, has taken the wraps off Skinfie Lab, a tool that creates personalised skincare product recommendations based on customers’ selfies.
This is making its debut at Watsons Hong Kong and will be rolled out to Thailand, Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia by early 2023.
It builds on the launch of an AI powered skincare advisor at Superdrug in the UK last year.
Hudson and Amazon
Hudson, which has more than 1,000 stores in airports, commuter hubs, landmarks, and tourist destinations across North America, has unveiled its combination Decanted and Hudson Nonstop concept at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW).
This is powered by Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology and the Amazon One biometric payments solution.
Spanning more than 1,600 square feet in Terminal B, the space brings together Hudson’s first ever wine bar and its travel essentials store, which uses the aforementioned Amazon checkout-free tech and palm recognition service.
Marks and Spencer
M&S has announced an expansion to its Insider programme with the arrival of five new Insiders – one of which is a virtual persona named Mira (aka Marks & Spencer, Influencer, Reality, Augmented).
This has been developed using a combination of photography, CGI and computer vision.
Mira was created in collaboration with Happy Finish.
Disney and Obsess
Disney Music Group and e-commerce platform Obsess have announced the launch of a Disney Music Emporium virtual experience.
This gives people an online way to discover, listen to, learn about and purchase soundtracks and songs from Disney’s catalogue.
Obsess is a participant in the 2022 Disney Accelerator, a programme focused on innovative companies from around the world.
