Featuring Cegid, FreedomPay, Rokt, and Klarna: 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 Crew Clothing, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Bestseller, Asda, Honey Birdette, Leroy Merlin, WHSmith, Albertsons Companies, Sainsbury’s, and UNTUCKit.

Crew Clothing

Cegid has expanded its partnership with Crew Clothing, with the brand now implementing the Newsfeed feature within Cegid Retail Store Excellence.

The British lifestyle label has been a user of the task management and retail operations platform since 2009 and has just rolled-out Newsfeed to its 105 stores.

This aims to bridge the gap between Crew’s management and store teams.

It’s helping the teams see not only company wide updates but also updates based on their store, role and interests.

The Newsfeed feature will also be rolled-out to Crew Clothing’s latest openings in Canterbury, Stow-on-the-Wold, and soon to launch stores in Monmouth and London Paddington.

Chipotle Mexican Grill

Chipotle Mexican Grill has announced the launch of its new mobile app in the UK, which aims to replicate the nuances of the in-restaurant ordering experience.

At checkout, users can select a restaurant location and pick-up time that is most convenient for them.

Additionally, Chipotle can now provide its guests with personalised offers and incentives that can be redeemed at any of its 19 restaurant locations across the country.  

It is offering a free meal to all customers once they make their first digital purchase on the new app or on online. This will appear in their Chipotle UK account within 72 hours of their initial meal purchase.  

"We are keenly focused on increasing access to our fresh food in the UK. The Chipotle UK app is the fastest way for our guests to try Chipotle and will better allow us to tailor our offerings and promotions to their individual preferences,” says Jacob M Summer, Director of European Operations.

The Gym Group

The Gym Group has announced a major upgrade to its mobile app.

Founded in 2007, The Gym Group now has 850,000 members and 236 gyms in the UK.

In a LinkedIn post, Jim Hingston, Digital Product Director, said: “We've developed some game changing new features taking our members' digital experience to the next level.”

“The update for our app includes new workout hub, personalised workout recommendations, new workout tracking to beat your personal best and ability to create your own workout.”

He added: “I’m looking forward to hearing the feedback from our members as we continue our product innovation. We've got a lot more to come.”

“Great to get this one out in the wild and I'm very proud of the team; in awe of their talent and hard work. A big thank you to our partners EGYM, LeisureLabs and Funxtion for their support and effort.”

FreedomPay

FreedomPay has launched Merchant Centric Acquiring (MCA), pitched as a first of its kind, independent and impartial advisory service available to merchants in the United States and Canada that democratises payment processing.

This promises to address the following merchant pain points:

• Providing a comprehensive rate assessment with no cost or obligation

• Transparency of cost and savings on a monthly and three-year basis

• Choice among MCA certified processors recommended and vetted by FreedomPay

• Fair Play Pledge delivers immediate rate reduction, immediate cancellation terms and immediate satisfaction

• A new approach and better way of making merchants a partner in the pricing process

The Bagel Factory

The Bagel Factory, a UK chain of convenience food outlets, has deployed menu boards powered by the nsign.tv digital signage software platform.

Founded in 1997 with its first store on Endell Street, London, The Bagel Factory has grown to over 32 outlets across United Kingdom, located at major travel hubs.

“We were in search of a cost-effective and user-friendly menu signage solution that could be easily deployed and maintained across all our stores,” says Abdul Mohamed, IT & Digital Business Partner at The Bagel Factory.

“We found nsign.tv incredibly user-friendly allowing us to easily maintain playlists and schedules.”

Bestseller

Voyado has announced a partnership with Bestseller to help it drive increased customer loyalty and deliver hyper-personalised experiences across all touchpoints.

Bestseller operates more than 20 brands, including JACK & JONES, Vero Moda, and Only.

These brands offer clothing and accessories for women, men, teenagers, and children in more than 16,000 multi-brand and department stores and approximately 3,000 branded Bestseller retail stores around the world.

This includes 70 countries in America, Asia, Europe, Oceania, and the Middle East. 

Steffen Simonsen, Head of Brand Tech, says: "The initial scope of our project was to acquire a loyalty management solution to integrate with our existing marketing automation platform.”

“However, we quickly saw the power of Voyado's unified solution to manage the loyalty programme and leverage the loyalty mechanisms seamlessly in our customer communication across all channels.”

"We realised that to be successful with our loyalty initiative, it would be critical to enable our users to get insights and act on all customer data, including loyalty data, as efficiently as possible.”

“This efficiency allows us to turn great ideas in the morning into impactful customer experiences by the afternoon without dependencies from central IT.”

UNTUCKit

NewStore has announced the extension of its partnership with UNTUCKit.

It says that the renewal highlights “the significant value the NewStore Unified Commerce Platform has delivered over the past six years, cementing the brand’s position as one of the world’s fastest growing and most innovative omnichannel retailers”.

Since going live in 2018, UNTUCKit has expanded its store footprint from 25 to more than 80 locations across the US, Canada, and the UK.

During that time, the organisation achieved a 40x return on its initial investment thanks to the incremental revenue driven by the platform’s omnichannel features. In the last year alone, that translated to a 19% uplift on UNTUCKit’s bottom line.

“When we re-evaluated the market, many vendors claimed to offer a lower total cost of ownership, but none were able to unlock growth in the same way as NewStore,” says Aaron Sanandres, Co-Founder and CEO, UNTUCKit.

“There is much talk about the promise of omnichannel in retail today, but it is clear that NewStore has the only platform to enable a truly unified customer experience across all our channels.”

Asda

Asda has partnered with Apadmi for a project involving it Rewards offering.

Asda Rewards is the supermarket giant’s loyalty app which came to market in 2022. This gives customers the opportunity to earn Asda Pounds into a Cashpot which they can spend at Asda either in-store or online.

The pair have already worked together alongside various delivery partners to launch the new Asda Rewards Baby Club, which gives a 10% cashpot across all baby items to all members who sign up from now until the end of June.

Apadmi’s App Store Optimisation specialists have been promoting the new initiative via in-App Events.

Honey Birdette

Kibo Commerce reports that Playboy Entertainment Group has selected and launched its order management solution for luxury lingerie apparel brand, Honey Birdette.

Key here was Kibo’s cloud native, microservices-based architecture. Its order management system (OMS) provides real-time inventory visibility across all locations, with intelligent order routing and omnichannel fulfilment.

“We’re proud to partner with Kibo to improve our order management operations as part of our ongoing efforts to deliver omnichannel customer experiences with ease,” says Marc Crossman, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer at Playboy Entertainment Group.

“With Kibo, we’re empowering our business users to have greater agility to respond to market dynamics and make quick changes on the fly, without relying on IT.”

Leroy Merlin

Hanshow and Leroy Merlin have partnered to deploy ESLs across over 50,000 products integrated with the the latter’s mobile app in France.

Customers can now experience easy product geolocation and personalised recommendations in Leroy Merlin stores. After 18 months of R&D, the retailer implemented a fully customised solution in all its outlets.

Leroy Merlin’s integration of Hanshow ESL into its app offers geolocation in-store to guide customers to products and aisles.

The ESL solution also provides price consistency between online and offline channels, boosting the user experience with various features such as customer reviews, enriched product descriptions, access the Home Index to assess a product's environmental and social impact, and the ability to flash labels directly from the application.

WHSmith

WHSmith has chosen Xiatech, the company behind Xfuze, pitched as the world’s first composable hyper-integration platform, as its partner to support the acceleration of the business’ growth and international expansion.

The ten-year partnership will involve WHSmith deploying Xfuze to create a real-time, hyper-connected business by integrating the system landscape and creating a single view of trusted data (including customers, sales, product, inventory), supporting the retailer’s operations and decision-making across its global business.

Lyndon Hearn, Group CIO, WHSmith, says: “As a business operating in more than 30 countries around the world, we are always looking at how we can consistently deliver the best possible experience for our customers, no matter where they shop with us.”

“We are excited to partner with Xiatech whose innovative integration, data and analytics platform offers us rapid feedback and insights from across our business, helping us stay connected to the needs of our colleagues, customers and suppliers and helping us to always be there for every one of life’s journeys.”

Albertsons Companies

Rokt has partnered with Albertsons Media Collective, the retail media arm of Albertsons Companies.

As a result, brands that are non-endemic to Albertsons' existing retail media network, meaning their products and services are not sold online by the company itself, will be able to reach and engage Albertsons' e-commerce customers through offers and messages that are relevant to them. 

The partnership extends across 11 of Albertsons' portfolio brands, including the Albertsons, Safeway, ACME Markets, Vons, Jewel-Osco, Shaw's Supermarkets, Carrs and Star Market banners.

Americanas Group

Americanas Group has selected Rimini Street and its Rimini Manage for SAP service to take over governance, management, control and operation of the 95-year-old retailer's SAP system landscape that spans corporate, e-commerce and logistic platforms, and more than 1,600 stores across Brazil.

“Choosing Rimini Street’s premium services is part of our strategy to seek partners who can strengthen our environments and allow us to increase operational efficiency and robustness, with continuous improvements,” says Sérgio Barros, CTO at Americanas.

“We count on it to undertake relevant activities and contribute to our strategic vision and long-term planning. This aligns with Americanas’ execution discipline, which is part of our DNA: with clear guidelines, we have the capacity to implement quickly.”

“Partnering with Rimini Street, we can shift the focus of our internal IT team from day-to-day governance, management and operation of our SAP systems to developing ways to engage our customers through new and innovative shopping experiences.”

Sainsbury’s

Klarna is now live at Argos, Habitat and TU, the result of a partnership with Sainsbury’s.

In a LinkedIn post, the company said: “Our innovative payment options - Pay Now, Pay Later, and Pay in 3 - are set to make online shopping experience even smoother.”

“With over 20 million Brits already using Klarna, we couldn't be more excited to extend our services to more household name stores!”

David Sykes, Chief Commercial Officer, commented: "Argos, Habitat, and TU are British icons known for reliability and value, making our interest free payment solutions a seamless fit."