- February 29 2024
From Retrospect to Prospect: Understanding 2023 and Predicting 2024
FashionAI: Sense and Cents returns with the perfect New Year edition! The newsletter shares insightful takes on 2023 and what’s to come in this new year, informed by observations from our team and conversations with our customer champions.
Beyond this, we’ve also collated major updates in the realms of fashion, AI, and retail to ensure you’re in the know. Ready to start the year up to date on everything AI and retail? Keep reading!
2023 Observations
Fast-Evolving AI Landscape in Retail
In the retail sector, we’ve witnessed a significant increase in focus on AI solutions, particularly related to how retail businesses engage with customers. A notable advancement is in enhanced personalization through visual search technology.
AI-driven systems now adeptly analyze customer preferences using visual cues, offering highly accurate and personalized product recommendations. This has led to increased customer engagement and satisfaction, with retailers seeing a boost in conversion rates and average order values.
New Ways to Search
We’ve also seen increased interest in the evolution of retail product search, where many retailers are looking beyond the traditional keyword search engines and wondering how AI can transform this part of the customer journey. There’s been an increased focus on the role of chatbots, with more retailers exploring how sales can be improved with AI-powered chatbots combined with product recommendations and visual search to complement consumer search and browsing behavior.
Recommendation Touchpoints and Context
Visual style-first recommendations are more impactful as they help consumers follow a style theme in ways performance-based recommendations just can’t do. For fashion, style is one of the key factors in purchase decisions. We’ve actively been iterating on various use cases with the customers in 2023 and to see this theme play out has been heartening.
Just to delve a bit further, when it comes to traditional fashion ecommerce, you are not browsing by an outfit, you are browsing by categories like top, bottom, etc. There may be links within using recommenders to suggest other outfits, but there’s no seamless, easy way to think about outfits as the buying unit. This results in a broken experience.
Another key learning is that context is the key. Providing the right message with the right products at the right stage in the shopping journey is key to increased engagement and average order size.
This is where ViSenze comes in, and the beauty of our tech makes it a very low to no operational overhead. This experience becomes more compelling and engaging for the consumer, leading to significant increases in average order size and revenue.
2024 Predictions
Retail Search Transformation
Retail search and discovery initiatives powered by AI are poised for significant advancements. Enhanced image recognition and deep learning algorithms will allow for more natural searches, capturing consumer intent, subtle style preferences, and trends to deliver better results to consumers. This will spell the beginning of the end of traditional keyword search in retail, and the emergence of a more natural search capability encompassing image, text, and voice, delivering better product results faster.
We expect to see closer pathways emerge between social platforms where consumers go to be inspired and retailer sites and apps where the majority of purchases will still take place. AI-powered multi-search capabilities will make it much easier and faster for consumers to find the products that inspire them and make those purchases.
Supercharging Conversions with Personalized Recommendations
AI-driven personalized recommendation systems are expected to become more sophisticated, utilizing customer data to offer highly customized product suggestions. These systems can integrate real-time data analytics, adapting recommendations based on current shopper profiles, individual shopping behavior, and current trends.
The ability to personalize in both messaging and product assortment will continue to grow in importance to drive higher customer engagement and a sense that this brand “gets me.” That’s a real opportunity for brands to think about how they can be more engaging with the GenZ generation and connect better with them.
Social Commerce is Here!
Bridging social and commerce channels will be critical to market capture and strong user engagement and will provide some of the best opportunities to amplify marketing spend. Here’s a rather telling stat– the average shopper spends over 2.5 hours a day on the internet, with 40% of it being on social media; the majority of their fashion decisions are inspired by what they find there.
This is a generation that shops very spontaneously. It speaks to the power of how they are responsive to inspiration. So, it’s pivotal for brands to be really thinking about how they engage with this generation in the medium that they’ve grown up with and is natural for them.
Right now, there are a lot of limitations in how that can be directed back to brand purchasing experiences. It is key that brands take these inspirations and directly lead customers to experiences that translate to purchases.
We’ve already helped retailers build integrations to grab images from social media streams that have their products and hashtags, pull those back in, and then develop a permission-based approach for those to be curated and displayed on the website.
Bite-Sized News: Updates from the World of AI & Retail
The Very Group ventures into Generative AI
The Very Group, a British ecommerce retailer, is unveiling its latest initiative, Gen AI Innovation Lab. Fueled by generative AI, machine learning, and robust storage capabilities, the lab is designed to elevate customer shopping experiences through interactive and personalized digital interactions. This move underscores The Very Group’s ongoing commitment to integrating AI technologies. Notably, the company has already leveraged AI successfully in optimizing business operations, utilizing it for product demand forecasting and inventory planning.
Introducing pAInt, your AI-powered painting assistant
In partnership, Accenture and a France-based home improvement retailer, Bricorama, have unveiled ‘pAInt,’ an innovative AI-driven shopping assistant tailored for painting projects. This collaborative tool is crafted to inspire and assist customers throughout their projects, from suggesting trending styles for inspiration and facilitating material purchases to providing best practice guides for the painting process. pAInt empowers the brand to deliver a distinctive online experience, guiding customers seamlessly through the successful execution of their Do-It-Yourself (DIY) activities.
COP28 Fashion Summit
The United Nations’ annual Conference of the Parties was not merely a series of talks and discussions on climate change; it was also an effort to craft a global policy roadmap to address the issue. Within this framework, the United Nations hosted the COP28 Sustainable Fashion Summit, which served as a platform for the fashion industry to delve into discussions on sustainability and the circular economy. This year’s lineup featured renowned designers including Stella McCartney, Rami Kadi, Gelareh Designs, and the Indian duo Shantnu & Nikhil.
Art Basel Miami 2023: Where fashion met art
The fusion of fashion and art claimed the spotlight at Art Basel Miami 2023. Spanning from December 5th to 10th, the event showcased a diverse array of artistic expressions, including digital creations, striking installations, works from global artists, as well as creations from renowned designers and fashion products. The occasion also featured exclusive releases and collaborations from various brands.
That concludes this edition. We appreciate your support as we continue to enhance the ‘See. Style. Shop’ experience for you, our valued subscribers. Until we connect again, take care!
CONNECT WITH US