Including Pricer, Emperia, and Topsort: RTIH presents last week’s biggest retail technology plays at a glance

RTIH rounds up the stand out retail systems deals, launches, deployments and pilots from the past seven days. Including Hugo Boss, Waitrose, East of England Co-op, M&S, Currys, Secretlab, Vail Resorts, Weee!, Flying Tiger Copenhagen, and Alnatura.

BOSS

BOSS (Hugo Boss) is releasing a new virtual store.

Developed by Emperia, using its Creator Tools platform, the immersive experience is aiming to encourage consumers to engage more deeply with the brand and discover, shop, and gift its range of 24/7 lifestyle products that include styles from the holiday collection alongside top gifting items in a gamified environment, with the aim of simplifying and infusing the process of finding the perfect gift with a bit of fun. 

Fully shoppable, the new BOSS Holiday Virtual Experience is centred around BOSS XP, the brand’s loyalty membership programme, while accessible to the general public.

The experience is set in a villa like setting with fully transparent walls, allowing visitors free movement, while exploring the various items, encouraging exploration and provoking curiosity; all leading to a holiday courtyard, accessible to loyalty members, called the Private Garden.

The Private Garden offers a glimpse into the benefits of becoming a BOSS XP member, including a raffle, event invitations, exclusive experience access, complimentary alterations and product sneak peeks, all animated and clickable, offering visitor education and reflecting the brand’s shopper appreciation.

East of England Co-op

East of England Co-op reports improved labour productivity whilst boosting customer service delivery in-store with an electronic shelf label (ESL) solution from Pricer. 

Having announced the roll-out of Pricer’s ESLs to its entire store estate in March, East of England Co-op now uses the solution, powered by the company’s cloud-based Plaza platform, to centrally manage and control pricing, product information and promotions across all its ESLs. 

Eliminating the need for manual updates, the ESLs deliver real-time price and promotions updates, reducing the risk of pricing errors and ensuring accuracy and efficiency in shelf-edge operations. The solution also drives overall store efficiency by enabling store colleagues to focus their efforts on custome -focused and value adding tasks that deliver store performance.

Currys

Omnichannel technology retailer, Currys, has announced a range of upgrades to its UK&I stores.

It is switching from paper product pricing to digital labelling, known as ‘electronic shelf edge labelling’ (ESEL). This will arrive in 100 UK&I stores by the end of this financial year, with 60 going digital ‘pre-peak’.  

With clear labelling and easy to scan QR codes for further information, it seeks to make the in-store customer journey a lot smoother. ESEL will be managed by a centralised system which is also set to improve pricing accuracy and ultimately availability in stores for customers. 

The initiative has been driven by employee feedback that manual paper printing and labelling could become a real pain point for teams during busy trading periods.

Teams will now be freed up to spend more time helping customers.

Currys has also introduced a digital queuing system across all its 298 UK&I stores.

This new process will be fronted by dedicated ‘Sales Floor Leaders’ who will be on-hand to give customers a ‘warm welcome’ and be identifiable to customers with ‘Here to Help’ hi-vis. 

Integrated into colleagues’ ‘store-mode’ tablets that are used to process customer orders, shoppers can now join a digital line to speak to a tech expert.

M&S

Marks & Spencer (M&S) has renewed and increased the scope of its services contract with Diebold Nixdorf for an additional four years.

The agreement includes support services for the entire store estate, managed services for self-checkout technology and self-order terminals in the digital cafés, implementation services for M&S stores and distribution centres, and software services.

Diebold Nixdorf has provided hardware services to the UK retailer since 2019.

The scope of services expansion of the new contract, which applies to the more than 1,000 M&S stores in the UK and Ireland, aims to increase the productivity of both Diebold Nixdorf field service engineers and M&S colleagues – leading to higher availability of store IT and a reduction in calls placed to the helpdesk.

Vail Resorts

Legion Technologies has expanded its relationship with Vail Resorts.

Over the past winter season, Vail Resorts mountain resort leaders, managers, and frontline employees implemented the technology and data in the Legion WFM platform, allowing them to optimise resort staffing to elevate guest service, employee experience, and efficiency.

It initially piloted Legion WFM's scheduling functionality at its two largest mountain resorts, Whistler Blackcomb and Park City Mountain. Over the past season, it expanded this functionality to all 37 of its resorts in the US and Canada.

Weee!

Topsort has announced a partnership with Weee!, America’s largest online Asian supermarket.

Founded in 2015, Weee! delivers fresh produce, pantry staples, snacks, and specialty items directly to customers, focusing on items that are often hard to find in mainstream supermarkets.

As it continues to grow in the competitive online grocery market, it recognised the need for a retail media platform that could scale with its expansion, provide transparency for sellers, and enhance the overall customer experience.

Previously, Weee! relied on an in-house advertising solution, but sought a more scalable and efficient platform. Topsort’s low code retail media dashboards, combined with AI driven APIs, provide it with the flexibility to implement a seamless, self-service retail media system.

This platform enables sellers to manage their campaigns with autobidding and keyword targeting, effectively reaching a broader audience. The transition to a fully automated, auction-based model also enables brands to expand within Weee!’s marketplace. 

Secretlab

Secretlab, an ergonomic furniture specialist brand, is partnering with Fluent Commerce in a bid to enhance global digital operations – scaling its order management system with Fluent Order Management.

“It’s great to see an innovative company like Secretlab choose Fluent Order Management,” says Graham Jackson, CEO, Fluent Commerce. “We have a track record for delivering enduring value to global retailers and our modern and scalable technology will set Secretlab up for long-term success.”

Packfleet and Who Gives A Crap

Packfleet and Who Gives A Crap are laying claim to the end of crappy deliveries for Londoners, with over nine million toilet rolls delivered across the capital. 

The latter is also saving approximately 54,500kg of carbon emissions thanks to Packfleet’s all electric fleet. 

This is set to continue to increase, with Packfleet on course to ship over 10 million rolls by the end of 2024. 

From working with the company alone, Who Gives A Crap is set to reduce the total carbon emitted by its UK-EU region by 0.6%.  To mark the new partnership, the team recently became Packfleet delivery drivers for the day. Londoners were treated to free cupcakes alongside their toilet roll, with furry friends being offered branded dog biscuits.   

Alnatura

Alnatura, a German retailer and producer of organic food, has upgraded to SaaS with Blue Yonder Category Management solutions. The project was implemented on time and under budget by Strategix, a Blue Yonder partner. 

Alnatura operates 153 supermarkets in 74 cities in Germany, selling over 1,300 different organic foods under its brand. These products are also sold through its trading partners in 14 countries across Europe.

In the fiscal year 2022/2023, it had a turnover of 1.149 billion euros net, with a growth of +2.3% compared to the previous fiscal year. In 2024, the company received two awards from the German Sustainability Prize Foundation.

It made the decision to migrate its Blue Yonder Category Management solutions to the cloud in order to upgrade its cost structure, increase supply chain resilience, and enhance agility. 

Flying Tiger Copenhagen

Flying Tiger Copenhagen is launching a new app with an accompanying Customer Club.

The latter is is a new initiative that’s part of its omnichannel strategy and it will be a key element in understanding customer preferences, delivering a better experience, rewarding loyalty and ensuring marketing efforts are more targeted and personalised.

The club was launched yesterday and customers that sign up to the app will be immediately rewarded with discounts ranging from 10% to 20% which can be applied to in-store purchases. 

Andre Filomeno, Senior Vice President for "Customer & Digital" at Flying Tiger Copenhagen, comments: “In 2023, we had around 100 million customers across our markets, and the majority of transactions happen in physical stores.”

“However, we are rolling out a number of initiatives to improve the experience, whether customers interact with us in the stores or digitally. Therefore, we are enhancing our customer experience across all platforms, making the new app a valuable addition to all of our channels and a key foundation of our omnichannel approach.”

Waitrose

NCR Atleos has announced a new five-year agreement to provide Atleos’ Cashzone Network ATMs in the John Lewis Partnership’s Waitrose supermarkets across the UK.

The John Lewis Partnership owns and operates John Lewis and Waitrose and is the largest employee owned business in the UK. The collaboration with NCR Atleos has resulted in increased awareness of John Lewis Money products and easier access to cash for consumers.

“Atleos has been a trusted strategic teammate over the past decade. Brought together by our shared customer first values, we have been able to innovate around cash access and provide customers with a simple, secure way to withdraw cash in-store,” says Andy Piggott, Director of Credit and Banking at John Lewis Money.