Executives From Meta, Google, Nordstrom and Selfridges to Be Showcased at Tech Forum
The business and culture of shopping are quickly evolving with retail’s tech adoption speeding ahead years faster than previously expected. Intriguing features across digital and real-world stores are now essential tools for brands as they pursue in-demand customer experiences while simultaneously preparing for the next generation of Web3 commerce.
The next few years will be crucial. From trends like livestream shopping and BOPIS to mixed reality, NFTs and more, get inside the major tech trends sweeping the fashion and beauty sectors now and in the future. This is the context for the upcoming WWD x FN x Beauty Inc Tech Forum, titled: “Retail 4.0: The Next Five Years.”
More from WWD
The virtual event is set for June 30 and will showcase thought leaders and influencers from Meta, TikTok, Selfridges, The Estée Lauder Cos., Nordstrom, Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Red Wing Shoes and Abercrombie Brands, among others.
To help set the stage for the event and reveal how the industry has changed from a tech perspective, Edmond Mesrobian, chief technology officer at Nordstrom Inc., said when he joined the luxury retailer in 2018, “I knew that Nordstrom was digitally advanced, given its online commerce presence for decades. At the time, we were leveraging data in silos, but that’s different than having a connected enterprise. Now, we’re breaking down channel barriers. What we’re most excited about right now is bringing our heritage of service to life in a digital context by enhancing digital discovery and delivering personalization at scale.”
One of the more significant changes across the industry that continues to evolve is how merchants are leveraging data. Machine learning and AI have been a gamechanger and powerful tools for customer engagement.
At Nordstrom, Mesrobian said the company has “taken a big step toward becoming a digital enterprise, actually embedding and compressing time. It’s an ability to send signals, measurements — whether an online click, entry into the store, a purchase — we can sense and translate those signals into action [using] different machine and AI models. We can go from sensing something about the customer to transforming it into an action to benefit them.”
When asked how have recent challenges positioned the company for the future, Mesrobian described it as transformative. “The past few years were difficult, but it gave us an ability to focus, accelerate, and to get on the other side of our digital transformation,” he explained. “It was transformative in how our Nordstrom, Nordstrom Rack, and digital capabilities come together to fulfill an order anywhere in our network. For example, a significant number of nordstrom.com orders for next-day store pickup get picked up in a Nordstrom Rack store, not just in our Nordstrom stores. You wouldn’t imagine that a few years ago, but it’s just one example of how the new Nordstrom is a connected enterprise.”
Mesrobian will be going into more detail at the June 30 tech forum. Also on the agenda to speak is Selfridges managing director Andrew Keith. Regarding the role technology plays in customer engagement, Keith said technology is fundamental. “I think that, through the pandemic, customer behavior changed seismically,” he explained. “Technology plays a central role in what the future holds for our customers. There’s a growing expectation to offer a hybrid physical and digital experience. It’s about being brave and bold and harnessing technology to do things differently.”
Selfridges has been a pioneer in deploying various technologies and continues to do so as tech evolves and expands via NFTs as well as the metaverse. “We were really excited about being able to meet our customers in a space that was new to us and create this flagship in the first Metaverse Fashion Week,” Keith noted. “It was really dynamic and exciting. We offered NFTs in a space inspired by our Birmingham store, which is very futuristic. It was a great way of bringing that all together.”
The metaverse will be a key theme at the tech forum — even though it is still in its early stages. Rola Daaboul, special counsel at Akerman LLP, will share insights into the legal considerations of the metaverse — a virtual landscape where brands will still need to protect their intellectual property.
Daaboul said the building out of the metaverse infrastructure “is actually at the forefront of every major brand and even minor ones minds right now. So what they’re doing is arming and protecting themselves as they go into this new venture. They’re preserving their brand so they can stake their claim in potential metaverse real estate — to build their shops, make sure that the brand is thoroughly represented in this new space, and preserve their ability to market their product there.”
Daaboul said there’s already a binding legal precedent when it comes to intellectual property. “But expanding that into this new space is starting to bring new questions to the forefront, as people file these lawsuits,” she explained adding that merchants, brands and their legal advisers are learning in real-time. “To a certain extent, we already have the core principles of intellectual property law that we’re applying,” Daaboul said. “But a lot of this right now is ‘do it, and then let’s wait and see what happens.’ Because the entire infrastructure has not yet been fully built out.”
[To register for this event, CLICK HERE]
Sign up for WWD's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
