Retail Tech: New Valentino Chatbot, Obsess Debuts Carbon Emissions Calculator

Glenn Taylor
·14 min read

The weekly Retail Tech Roundup compiles technology news across the supply chain, manufacturing, retail, e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment sectors.

Chat

Valentino/GameOn

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Luxury fashion brand Valentino is working with chat platform GameOn Technology to incorporate AI-powered chat into the Spring and Summer global activation, “Unboxing Valentino.” The partnership marks GameOn’s entrance into fashion as well as Valentino’s first efforts into the chat and generative AI space.

Launched March 15, Unboxing Valentino showcases renowned stylists and artists in eight global cities—New York, London, Paris, Milan, Dubai, Shanghai, Seoul and Tokyo.

GameOn’s intelligent chat platform uses select elements of GPT technology to empower conversational experiences that are designed to feel authentic, enabling Valentino to create dynamic social interactions. For example, customers can type phrases like “shipping,” “inspire me” or even “style icon quiz” in the Valentino app to receive assistance on a line of topics from customer care to product discovery. The interactions will leverage GPT technology, within guardrails set by GameOn, to reduce transaction risk for Valentino and drive instantaneous, more accurate feedback for customers while still driving a personalized and safe experience.

More than a dozen North American major league sports franchises rely on GameOn’s chat platform, including the Las Vegas Raiders, Philadelphia 76ers, New York Islanders, Detroit Pistons, Milwaukee Bucks and more. While GameOn’s presence in sports focuses on helping teams assist fans, the company’s foray into retail represents a significant milestone for bringing AI-driven conversations and experiences to engage shoppers inquiring about high fashion.

Last-mile delivery

Descartes/Localz

Descartes Systems Group, a provider of on-demand, SaaS solutions focused on improving the productivity, security, and sustainability of logistics-intensive businesses, has acquired the assets of last-mile delivery technology platform Localz.

Headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, the Localz platform combines real-time vehicle location tracking and communications to deliver solutions that are designed to transform the customer delivery experience. End customers can schedule services and deliveries through an online portal, and then follow the progress of their order in real-time with advanced notifications built in. Localz can also help retailers provide a premium, efficient click-and-collect solution that improves the in-store collection process.

Descartes paid $6.2 million in cash for the Localz assets.

On-demand manufacturing

SubMFG/Epson

On-demand direct-to-garment (DTG) manufacturer and cut-and-sew warehouse SubMFG installed the Epson SureColor F10070 and SureColor F10070H production dye-sublimation printers and multiple SureColor F3070 DTG printers to produce its signature apparel offerings.

SubMFG has experienced increased business productivity and output efficiency, further increasing its in-house capabilities and output capacity.

Located in San Diego, Calif., SubMFG is a full cut-and-sew house that resells products to apparel companies, and assists clients with original equipment manufacturing.

“We like to think of ourselves as a technology company, not just a textile company,” said Jeremy DeBoer, general manager, SubMFG, in a statement. “Technology in the last 10 years has completely changed our business, and when we were introduced to the SureColor F-Series dye-sublimation, it was exactly what we were looking for.”

SubMFG has been producing quality sublimated products for over 19 years.

“Previously, within the sublimation business you really had to buy everything third party,” he said. “The Epson dye-sub printers are a complete solution. We’ve found it’s a lot easier to keep them running on a regular basis and the efficiency is much better than what we had before.”

Since installing the SureColor dye-sublimation printers, the SubMFG team has benefited from the production-focused features designed for round-the-clock productivity.

“The great thing about having two of the SureColor F-Series printers is you can run the exact same job on both printers and get the same consistency. Our color values are almost identical to one another on both printers,” DeBoer said.

With dye-sublimation technology rapidly advancing, the SureColor F-Series production printers are designed for high-production manufacturers such as SubMFG, according to Tim Check, senior product manager, professional imaging, Epson America, Inc.

Since installing the SureColor F10070 and F10070H, SubMFG has added DTG printing to its in-house capabilities, installing multiple SureColor F3070 DTG printers.

“Our quality really matters to us. Whether it’s DTG or dye-sublimation, we want the best quality we can produce,” said DeBoer.

Carbon emissions

Obsess

Obsess, an experiential e-commerce platform enabling brands to create immersive 3D virtual stores, has launched a Carbon Emissions Calculator for brands to analyze the energy output for brick-and-mortar stores in comparison to their virtual counterparts. The company has created more than 200 virtual stores for brands including Ralph Lauren, Coach, Tommy Hilfiger, American Girl and beauty brand Charlotte Tilbury.

Within the tool, retailers can input values for physical store estimates, including store square footage, daily foot traffic and number of employees.

Based on these inputs, Obsess calculates the average output for store construction (including material production and transportation and construction activities) and the average output for store operations (including employee labor, commute and store electricity).

When calculating the footprint for a retail store, Obsess examined construction and operational carbon emissions for the duration of a store operating 30 years and then averaged out the initial construction emissions to determine a yearly estimate. Improving carbon efficiency, for power production and commutes, contributes to decreases in total emissions from a retail store. Similarly, virtual store carbon emissions from rendering and hosting can be reduced by carbon efficiencies in power sources used by cloud service providers. Obsess calculates carbon emissions per store by dividing total AWS carbon emissions by the total number of virtual stores operated in 2022.

Outbound product shipments are not included in the calculation. Corporate employee and office operations have also been excluded.

Customer data platform

Authentic Brands Group/Amperity

Authentic Brands Group (ABG), a global brand development, marketing, entertainment and digital platform, has partnered with enterprise customer data platform (CDP) Amperity.

As part of the deal, Amperity will become ABG’s cornerstone partner for data management strategy, in an effort to unify in-store and digital experiences for consumers across its portfolio of brands.

With more than 40 iconic brands, including Reebok, Forever 21, Aéropostale and Eddie Bauer, Authentic’s digital platform is powered by more than 200 million consumer data files.

In partnership with Amperity, ABG will look to activate data from multiple online and offline touch points, including pre-purchase, point-of-sale and post-purchase customer care, to create unified customer profiles.

“We strive to provide the most optimal shopping experience for our consumers, and having a clean data foundation is essential,” said Adam Kronengold, chief digital officer, Authentic Brands Group. “Amperity’s platform allows us to resolve identities at scale across our portfolio and leverage data to inform brand and business development decisions.”

Amperity solutions can bring together the Brooks Brothers and Barneys New York owner’s diverse consumer data to enable a 360-degree unified view and comprehensive understanding of its brand consumers to enhance each brands’ digital engagement strategy.

Authentic’s brands generate approximately $24.7 billion in global annual retail sales and have a retail footprint in more than 150 countries, including 10,500-plus freestanding stores and shop-in-shops and 375,000 points of sale.  More than 400 brands leverage Amperity, including Brooks Running, Tapestry and Under Armour.

Fit technology

Canali/Naiz Fit

Italian luxury men’s wear brand Canali has gone live with the Naiz Fit sizing solution on its e-commerce stores. With the partnership, Canali customers may now use the Naiz Fit digital tailor to find ideal fitting merchandise when shopping online.

Naiz Fit is an offering from MySize, Inc., an omnichannel e-commerce platform and provider of AI-driven measurement solutions, which acquired the business in October 2022.

Without asking customers to measure themselves, Naiz Fit obtains more than 20 body measurements using its proprietary AI and computer vision capabilities by transforming simple images into body measurements. For customers who do not want to use photos, Naiz Fit implements statistical modeling algorithms to determine size and fit based on height, weight, age, gender and fit preference. Convolutional neural networks can enable the company’s technology to extract direct body measurements and body morphologies with the highest accuracy.

According to MySize CEO and founder Ronen Luzon, a similar luxury brand to Canali has made over 112,000 size recommendations to date using Naiz Fit, leading to a 37 percent increase in basket value and 800 percent increase in conversion rate compared to shoppers who did not use Naiz Fit.

MySize will begin generating revenues from the SaaS agreement effective immediately.

A family-run company now in its third generation, Canali is a modern-day design and manufacturing group with five production centers all located in Italy and around 1,400 employees worldwide. In addition to its 150 boutiques, a number that continues to grow, the brand can also be found in more than 1,000 retail stores in more than 100 countries worldwide.

Product data

GS1/Snowflake

GS1 US has launched a data hub for product information on Snowflake Marketplace, giving joint customers access to a local U.S. online repository of nearly 45 million product records created by brand owners.

The joint effort between GS1 US and Snowflake, a data storage and analytics service provider, is designed to help inform business decisions, optimize supply chains and drive innovations by eliminating the need to manually validate product information across platforms via search results or complex spreadsheets. The GS1 US Data Hub capability will allow users to use and verify data through Snowflake’s single, integrated platform, which can allow joint customers to bring the benefits of GS1 US directly to their operational data.

Since the product data on Snowflake Marketplace is always current, validated by brands and convenient to access, users can ideally increase the accuracy of the product data they use for their transaction platforms and analytics, GS1 says.

The collaboration also gives retailers a more modern approach to verifying universal product code (UPC) codes and enabling products to quickly move from a warehouse to store shelves. This can often be difficult as retailers often struggle to streamline their item setup process and need a way to verify product information in their item catalog.

Snowflake Marketplace is powered by Snowflake’s cross-cloud technology, Snowgrid, allowing companies direct access to raw data products and the ability to leverage data, data services and applications. The marketplace is designed to simplify discovery, access and the commercialization of data products, enabling companies to potentially unlock entirely new revenue streams and extended insights across Snowflake Data Cloud.

Logistics

Turvo/Veritas Logistics

Turvo, a collaboration application designed for the supply chain, has partnered with Veritas Logistics, a third-party logistics (3PL) firm headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Veritas specializes in a range of 3PL services including temperature controlled, flatbed, dedicated capacity, dry van, expedited services, less-than-truckload (LTL), drayage, intermodal and high-value cargo shipments.

Veritas selected Turvo as its partner and transportation management systems (TMS) provider to accelerate growth, and is live on the Collaboration Cloud platform at its locations across Ohio, Arkansas and Illinois. With Turvo, Veritas has achieved tremendous growth with a 242 percent increase in year-over-year revenue, a 323 percent increase in shipment volume and a better overall customer and carrier experience.

Additionally, Veritas has increased its employee headcount by 350 percent in 12 months. With Turvo, Veritas employees benefit from rapid onboarding and adoption with guided training via Turvo Academy.

With Turvo’s TMS, Veritas offers its network of employees, carriers, drivers and customers a common, cloud platform to collaborate and manage orders and shipments with real-time visibility into every movement and every transaction. Veritas operators can plan, execute and settle freight with more accuracy and manage shipments by exception to keep customers informed as issues arise. Veritas operators can engage with customers in real-time, keep them informed to eliminate manual check calls and the redundancies of legacy TMS providers.

Warehouse management

JASCI Software/Tompkins Robotics

Warehouse management and automation solutions provider JASCI Software has announced a partnership with Tompkins Robotics to launch a batch pick and robotic unit sortation technology for warehouses.

Tompkins Robotics’ advanced robotics technology, tSort, is designed to incorporate artificial intelligence that can provides enhanced levels of warehouse efficiency and accuracy. The technology works within JASCI’s warehouse management and robotics execution software, enabling warehouses to improve their order fulfillment processes and reduce operational costs.

With the JASCI WMS and Tompkins Robotics tSort for the Warehouse, warehouses can benefit from increased accuracy, improved efficiency and reduced labor costs, the companies say. The system is built to be customized to suit the specific needs of individual warehouses.

The system is designed to minimize errors and reduce the risk of incorrect orders being shipped to customers. And by automating the sorting process, warehouses can increase batch sizes and improve their picking and fulfillment speed, enabling them to fulfill orders faster and more efficiently. Additionally, tSort Sortation Robotics for the Warehouse can significantly reduce the amount of manual labor required to sort and fulfill orders, allowing warehouses to reallocate and reduce resources in the warehouse.

Tompkins Robotics has already been deployed to many customers and the tSort solution has been fully integrated with JASCI’s warehouse management platform.

Social commerce

Flip

Flip, a social commerce app designed to connect shoppers to products, content and community through video reviews, has launched MagicOS, a self-service e-commerce operating system.

The Flip app is designed to be a destination for discovery—powered by community and patented technology that links user video reviews to confirmed purchases. MagicOS offers an end-to-end marketplace of consumers and brands in the lifestyle, wellness and nutrition, electronics, fitness, home goods and other categories.

On Flip, a brand’s customers are both ambassadors and content creators. The platform requires its more than 2 million users to buy the actual product before being able to post reviews. Brands are not allowed to incentivize creators for reviews on Flip, which is a decision designed to further build both trust and engagement.

MagicOS is the operating system allowing Flip to accelerate its growth from onboarding 10 brands per month in November, before the self-serve system began beta testing, to hundreds of new brands per month. The company expects this to scale to thousands of brands by the end of June.

MagicOS offers a sales dashboard that tracks sales metrics, can find out how many items have shipped to customers and can check real-time data for videos featuring their products in a single view. The platform can review inventory health, manage stock-outs effectively and monitor the quantity of stock as well as the ordered products. Users can also track the performance of all content on Flip related to the brand to know which products are popular and which ones are talked about the most.

Additionally, users can target specific users to test new products and potentially create a flywheel effect of user generated content and repeat buyers. These same users can manage product listings and track transfers and revenue in a single dashboard. The platform includes ads performance management, which is designed to remove all the usual guesswork involved in performance advertising with self-serve ads management tools.

MagicOS is an end-to-end system where users can view short form videos on the Flip App—shoppers spend 25 minutes per day on the app and Flip averages 35 million monthly video views. Flip’s one-click payment experience does not require leaving the app for a third-party website.

The launch of MagicOS follows Flip’s $60 million Series B funding round led by WestCap & Streamlined Ventures in 2022, which valued the company at $500 million and brought its total amount of financing raised to $95 million.

With a growing community of shoppers sharing video reviews of products they’ve purchased on the platform, buyers on Flip can discover products through 60 second videos of user-generated content that is shoppable with one-click checkout and same day shipping.

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