Starring Coach, Aldi, and Instacart: RTIH runs you through the week's coolest retail technology plays
RTIH Editor, Scott Thompson, brings you his top ‘future of retail’ systems launches and deployments from the past week, including smart cart deals, live selling milestones, food waste prevention initiatives, and recycling tech trials.
Walmart
Walmart is adopting new measures designed to reduce the amount of packaging waste associated with online orders.
This includes moving from plastic to recyclable paper mailers, right-sizing cardboard box packaging, giving customers the option to consolidate shipping on e-commerce orders, opting out of single-use plastic bags for online pickup orders and last mile delivery efficiencies to reduce mileage and delivery times.
“With a Walmart store located within 10 miles of 90% of the US population, we can make a meaningful difference for our customers by strategically using our stores and last mile delivery network to reduce waste and emissions,” says Jennifer McKeehan, Senior Vice President of End-to-End Delivery at Walmart U.S.
“I’m proud of the efforts we’ve made and will continue to make as we keep regeneration at the forefront of delivery.”
Morton Williams
A2Z Smart Technologies Corp. has announced an order from Morton Williams, a retailer with 17 stores in the New York Metropolitan area.
This follows a pilot of the firm’s Cust2Mate smart carts at Morton Williams' West End Ave store in New York.
The new order initially consists of 100 specially designed 75-litre smart carts, tailored for deployment in urban supermarkets.
It encompasses an upfront payment, a guaranteed monthly payment, and a revenue share agreement on added-value solutions, such as advertising.
Whiskey Skies
Whiskey Skies, a women's fashion retailer, reports that it has reached over $10 million in lifetime live selling GMV on the CommentSold platform, utilising multi-casting live selling capabilities to drive sales across social channels, owned website and app.
Founded by Joanne Vitale in 2016, Whiskey Skies was built on a vision to make trendy clothing, home decor, and accessories accessible and affordable for women of all shapes and sizes.
Tapping CommentSold's warehouse management tools and shipping and fulfilment capabilities, it has scaled from an operation in Vitale’s home to a 7,000 sq.ft. warehouse.
Triumph Group
Lingerie specialist Triumph Group has signed a two-year partnership with ZS involving the deployment of Personalize.AI, the latter’s artificial intelligence driven, software-as-a-service product.
This leverages customer personal preferences, channel affiliation, promotion responsiveness and inventory to recommend the right content, product and offer at an individual customer level.
P.AI does this by using AI to engineer features, identify customer level opportunities and predict tailored product offer recommendations. It analyses, designs and launches targeted marketing activities in each market.
During a pilot phase, P.AI helped deliver up to 40% incremental conversion lift and create better experiences for its customers.
Triumph was able to identify customer preferences accurately and re-activate lost customers with a 2x lift.
The partnership covers nine APAC markets: Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, and India.
Coach
Aldi UK
Aldi UK has partnered with recycling technology company Polytag.
It will trial the deployment of Polytag’s invisible UV tags onto its packaging, starting from July.
With the company’s unique readers installed at the Biffa Teeside recycling centre, Aldi will get insights on the quantity of its packaging that is actually recycled and be able to track an item’s journey through said process.
This previously inaccessible packaging lifecycle information will help the supermarket accurately measure and track its performance against its sustainability targets, such as halving its plastic footprint by 2025.
Six Flags
Six Flags is set to become the first theme park operator to pilot Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology, with the aim of reducing wait times for customers wanting to purchase food and drinks.
It will soft launch the tech at its theme park in New Jersey on 1st June. A similar roll-out is planned later this year for the Six Flags Magic Mountain location in Los Angeles.
Visitors will be able to peruse the store, place items in their virtual cart and then leave when they’re done, with their selections automatically charged to the payment method used to gain entry.
Serve Robotics and Uber Eats
Serve Robotics has expanded its partnership with Uber Eats.
The company's commercial agreement allows for Serve to deploy its autonomous sidewalk delivery robots on Uber Eats in multiple markets across the United States, with up to two thousand robots set to be fielded.
Serve and Uber’s partnership began a year ago as a pilot in West Hollywood.
Since then, the former’s robotic deliveries have grown over 30% month over month, with 200+ restaurants in Los Angeles now participating.
Zyler
Augmented reality and artificial intelligence fashion tech solutions provider, Zyler, has introduced a way to implement virtual try-on into any retailer website.
The plug-in feature automates the integration process.
With just a couple of lines of code pasted into a new webpage, fashion retailers can allow customers to see themselves in outfits with a headshot and basic measurements.
To get set up, they provide Zyler with an image of a model wearing the clothes that they wish to be enabled for online try-on. The latter’s team will work with the images to prepare them for try-on.
Once this is completed, the Zyler Go solution will appear on the website, so customers can see the item of clothing on themselves while shopping.
Frasers Group
SADA has announced a new services engagement with Frasers Group, a retail conglomerate based in the UK.
This will see it develop and implement a new platform to help Frasers Group scale data visibility and reporting across its retailers, which includes Sports Direct.
“We selected Google Cloud because we were facing a data challenge – we knew we needed to play catch up in the data space, and that shifting to the cloud from an on-prem environment would be necessary,” said Simon Palmer, CIO at Frasers Group.
“In order to fulfil our mission of becoming a global player, we needed a provider familiar with the ecosystem and capabilities to help us scale quickly and efficiently. We knew that SADA would fit the bill.”
Olio and Whole Foods Market
Local sharing app, Olio, is launching a partnership with Whole Foods Market, supporting the Amazon owned retailer with food waste prevention at its stores in London.
Olio has been brought in after a six-week pilot scheme at its Kensington location.
This saw the former’s team collect over 1,200 kg of edible food from Whole Foods Market – the equivalent of 2,800 meals – with the store feeding 439 local households and avoiding 5,000 kg of CO2 emissions.
Whole Food Market’s London stores have committed to giving Olio’s volunteers any remaining organic produce that is not taken by its local charity partners at closing time.
They then use the Olio platform to help redistribute perishable food - including baked goods, delicious salads, deli counter items, meat, poultry and ready meals - to local households for free.
Instacart
Prada
Prada has announced the June instalment of its Timecapsule NFT collection. The drop, happening on 1st June, is a celebration of the upcoming summer period.
The company has designed a tank top in floral patterned jacquard terry cloth, an upcycled fabric from the Prada archive. It features the Prada enameled triangle logo on the front and the month June on the back.
Each shirt comes accompanied with its own gifted NFT, serving as an invitation to join Prada’s Crypted NFT community on Discord.
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