Retail Tech: Walmart x Web3, Amazon 3D/AR, J.Crew’s ‘Virtual Beach House’

Glenn Taylor
·13 min read

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

Virtual technology

Amazon/Hexa

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Amazon is partnering with Hexa, a 3D visualization platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create digital twins of real-life products that can be deployed on websites, social media and in augmented reality (AR) applications.

Now the e-commerce giant’s sellers can access Hexa’s proprietary immersive operating system to create and display applicable 3D images, immersive 360-degree viewing, virtual try-on capabilities and AR content on their Amazon product pages.

Working alongside the Amazon Web Services (AWS) spatial computing team and the Amazon.com imaging teams, AWS partner Hexa and Amazon have built a workflow that empowers Amazon selling partners to bridge the gap between 2D and 3D.

Regardless of an Amazon selling partner’s experience level with 3D or AR, the new workflow is designed to be usable by all. Amazon selling partners will now be able to upload their Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) into Hexa’s CMS, and the system will automatically convert as little as one image into a high-fidelity 3D model with AR compatibility.

According to Hexa’s chief technology officer, Jonathan Clark, in addition to 3D reconstruction, further enhancements to Hexa’s 3D tech stack also allow Amazon sellers to render high-definition marketing materials, including packshots and lifestyle images directly from their 3D digital twins.

Amazon, Macy’s and Crate & Barrel are among the dozens of companies that now use the Hexa 3D platform to make, manage and deploy their 3D assets. The models can be moved onto any web page, social media site or game engine with a snippet of code, the company says. Hexa’s 3D Viewer facilitates parallel processing, loading at the maximum frames per second without sacrificing computational power, with the firm indicating that its 3D models load as quickly as 2D images and are immediately interactive.

In March, Hexa raised a $20.5 million Series A round from Point72 Ventures, Samurai Incubate, Sarona Partners and HTC. The company has raised $27.5 million to-date.

J.Crew/Obsess

J.Crew has launched an immersive virtual store powered by experiential e-commerce platform Obsess. The 3D, shoppable experience celebrates the retailer’s 40th anniversary and takes the form of a beach house that features six unique rooms and a separate boathouse. The J.Crew Virtual Beach House also offers rich interactive content highlighting the brand’s heritage, along with gamified elements and checkout.

“We are excited to celebrate J.Crew’s 40th anniversary with the launch of the J.Crew Virtual Beach House in partnership with Obsess,” said Derek Yarbrough, chief marketing officer of J.Crew and Madewell. “This immersive experience brings J.Crew’s past and present together, giving our customers a virtual passport to explore the world of J.Crew, while shopping a curated edit of summer styles in an innovative digital format.”

The Virtual Beach House is a 360-degree celebration of J.Crew’s iconic heritage featuring the colors, patterns, textures and media that have represented the fashion company for the past 40 years. The experience enables shoppers to discover J.Crew clothing, shoes and accessories in themed rooms with contextual merchandising that allows them to learn more about the products.

For example, customers can visit the Floral Room and shop Made-in-Spain espadrilles after learning about the 14th-century origin of the shoe’s design. The Virtual Beach House also features images from the brand’s storied catalogs and a Catalog Cover Pop Quiz in addition to a multi-room, interactive scavenger hunt game.

Web3

Walmart

Walmart’s startup incubator, Store No.8, has teamed up with Outlier Ventures, a Web3 investment firm and accelerator, to launch the Store No.8 dCommerce Base Camp accelerator.

The virtual program will offer education, funding and mentorship to startups building solutions in Web3 that are designed for the retail and commerce experience.

Focus areas will include decentralized infrastructure, data and growth solutions, immersive experiences and the metaverse and the intersection of AI and blockchain technology.

Beginning in mid-August, founders will take part in a 12-week program. The cohort members will receive funding and access to subject matter experts from Store No. 8 and Outlier Ventures. They will also receive support from industry mentors in areas such as product roadmap development, the token economy and fundraising.

“Decentralized commerce has the potential to unlock new value in the global commerce ecosystem, so we are excited to partner with Outlier Ventures to support and engage with entrepreneurs building at the forefront of this technology on their path to scale,” said Thomas Kang, vice president, Store No. 8, in a statement.

Walmart has already entered the metaverse through an activation on Roblox, and also introduced a platform for digital collectibles.

Customer experience

Salesforce/Google

Salesforce and Google Cloud expanded their strategic partnership to help businesses use data and AI to deliver more personalized customer experiences, better understand customer behavior and run more effective campaigns at a lower cost across marketing, sales, service and commerce.

Two new data and AI innovations will bring real-time data sharing with enhanced predictive and generative AI capabilities, so businesses can use their data and their custom AI models to better predict customer needs and reduce the cost, risk and complexity of synchronizing data across platforms.

Salesforce cited its own reports, noting that 80 percent of business leaders say data is critical in decision-making at their organization, yet 41 percent find their data too complex and inaccessible to be useful. With that in mind, the new integrations are geared to help businesses solve the problem of accessing and understanding data and allow companies to use their data to power AI insights across their business that drive better customer experiences.

The new integration between Salesforce Data Cloud and Google’s BigQuery will enable companies to more easily create unified profiles of their customers to provide new, highly personalized experiences. Salesforce and Google Cloud will provide customers with data access across platforms and across clouds, akin to having their data housed in a single location—with zero-copy or zero-ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) that can reduce the cost and complexity of moving or copying it while maintaining governance and trust.

The Data Cloud and BigQuery integration will be in pilot late-2023, and generally available in early 2024.

New integrations between Salesforce Data Cloud and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI will enable customers to bring their own models from Vertex and use them across the Salesforce platform, addressing the specific needs of their businesses, such as predicting buying behavior or churn likelihood, across their Salesforce Customer 360 data.

The Data Cloud and Google Vertex AI integration will be in pilot mid-2023, and generally available by the end of 2023.

Zero-copy data access for AI model training can maximize a company’s AI investment by providing access to unified customer data, thereby streamlining the model development process and enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of AI predictions and insights.

Industries can use Salesforce’s Data Cloud and Google’s BigQuery and Vertex AI to improve the customer experience and personalize interactions.

For example, a fashion retailer can connect CRM data, like customer purchase history and service interactions, with non-CRM data like real-time online activity or social media sentiment. It can deploy custom AI models that predict customers’ likelihood to buy certain types of clothing based on that data, and deliver hyper-personalized recommendations to customers via the most appropriate channel, including email, a mobile app, or social media.

Salesforce and Google first launched their strategic technology partnership in 2017, in an effort to help customers turn marketing, sales, service and commerce data into actionable insights and better business outcomes. Since then, companies of all sizes and across all industries have been leveraging Google and Salesforce together to enhance marketing, provide AI-powered customer experiences and increase productivity.

The Marketing Cloud and Google Analytics integration will be available later this year.

Customer data

Forever 21/Amperity

Forever 21 has selected enterprise customer data platform (CDP) Amperity to deliver more relevant, personalized customer experiences to its consumers. With Amperity, Forever 21 wants to reach more consumers, while enriching advertising campaigns through insights on cross-channel behavior, data science scores and content affinities.

The fast-fashion retailer said that while it had a “significant” amount of customer data from both its digital channels and offline transactions, it needed a comprehensive solution to bring together and manage all of these disparate data sources. Through an Amperity-powered 360-degree unified view, Forever 21 can now unify, activate and acquire new customers and retain existing ones.

“The future of retail lies in how well a company understands the customer journey,” said Jacob Hawkins, chief marketing, digital and omni officer at Forever 21 in a statement. “Amperity enables us to create unified customer profiles and actionable insights we need to scale. The company’s best-in-class platform, in combination with its significant retail industry expertise, will help us continue to fuel our growth, deepen customer loyalty, and operate at the highest level of efficiency.”

Combining first-party data and third-party data can have an immediate and significant impact for brands looking to truly understand their customers throughout the customer lifecycle. With Amperity’s patented, AI-powered technology, Forever 21 will also be able to use enterprise-scale identity resolution and audience segmentation to drive retargeting, lookalike and suppression campaigns.

Sparc Group, the joint venture of Forever 21 parent company Authentic Brands Group and Simon Property Group, claims it increased return on ad spend (ROAS) fivefold using the Amperity platform’s segmentation capabilities. The Sparc umbrella also consists of apparel and footwear brands including Aéropostale, Brooks Brothers, Eddie Bauer, Lucky Brand, Nautica and Reebok.

Logistics

Alba Wheels Up

Freight forwarder and logistics and supply chain solutions provider Alba Wheels Up has debuted the Alba Tracking and Visibility Portal. This platform is designed to offer clients unprecedented visibility and control over their global supply chains.

With the Alba Tracking and Visibility Portal, clients gain real-time access to critical information regarding their shipments, enabling them to make more informed decisions and better optimize their supply chain operations.

The platform provides up-to-the-minute updates on shipment location, departure and arrival times, content details, and other essential data points to ensure more transparency in the logistics process.

In addition to its tracking capabilities, the Alba Tracking and Visibility Portal also incorporates advanced analytics and reporting tools. By harnessing these features, clients can gain deeper insights into their supply chain performance, identify optimization opportunities, fine-tune inventory levels and ultimately reduce costs.

Omnichannel

Logicbroker/Kibo

Logicbroker, a supply chain experience management e-commerce platform and a provider of advanced drop ship, marketplace and B2B supply chain visibility solutions, has entered a partnership with Kibo Commerce, a composable digital commerce platform for retailers, manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers that offers order management, e-commerce and subscriptions solutions.

This collaboration aims to enable retailers and brands to efficiently expand their assortment via all B2B and DTC e-commerce models including drop ship, marketplace and supply chain visibility.

By leveraging synergies between Logicbroker’s platform, which processes $6.3 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) each year and can reduce an organization’s requirements for full-time equivalent (FTE) hours worked, and Kibo Commerce, both organizations aim to provide more unique visibility, growth and empowerment tools for merchants.

Kibo Commerce wants to empower businesses to create seamless, engaging shopping experiences across all channels that can drive revenue and customer satisfaction. With more shoppers wanting retailers to show in-store product availability on their websites, the company seeks to addresses this demand by enabling customers to search and filter by inventory in stock at their location of choice and facilitating a choice of fulfillment options on the product detail page.

Boscov’s has already harnessed the power of the Logicbroker and Kibo Commerce partnership, seeing a 40 percent in-store upsell rate on buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) purchases.

On average, Kibo Commerce clients experience 200 percent digital revenue growth in one year, while seeing 42 percent cost savings.

Key strategic benefits of working with Kibo Commerce and Logicbroker include scalable growth, with the companies enabling businesses to scaling while maintaining control over operations. Integrating Kibo Commerce’s omnichannel capabilities with Logicbroker’s drop ship marketplace can streamline supply chain operations, order management and fulfillment processes.

With an expanded assortment, users gain access to an extensive network of suppliers and a robust drop ship marketplace allows for quick expansion of product offerings.

Forecasting

Impact Analytics

Impact Analytics, a provider of AI-based solutions for supply chain and merchandise planning in retail, CPG and manufacturing, has closed a new funding from Vistara Growth.

The undisclosed round follows two sets of funding secured in February 2021 and October 2022 from Argentum.

This funding round will accelerate the company’s global expansion plans and help the company further develop the Impact Analytics SmartSuite product portfolio, which optimizes forecasting, merchandising and end-to-end lifecycle pricing. Clients such as BJ’s Wholesale Club, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Puma and Tapestry among others choose Impact Analytics to power their planning and pricing workflows.

While companies historically create forecasts based on the preceding year’s results, this is no longer a tenable strategy. Using more than 150 variables to mix recency and history, Impact Analytics products process more than 30,000 modeling constructs to generate highly accurate forecasts that drive smarter decision making, improved operational efficiencies and maximized profits.

Procurement

ProcureAbility/DSilo

Procurement services provider ProcureAbility has partnered with DSilo, a deep learning company focused on accelerating cost savings, compliance and productivity improvements for businesses by augmenting existing customer procurement capabilities with artificial intelligence (AI).

The strategic collaboration aims to enhance the performance of procurement organizations. ProcureAbility will leverage DSilo’s proprietary technology platform ProcureGPT to augment, not replace, existing systems and human talent to provide enhanced value through intelligent insights and actions.

With the introduction of this technology, the companies aim to address and minimize challenges faced by today’s procurement organizations that are often managing disconnected processes and relying heavily on manual tasks.

ProcureGPT integrates with existing contract management and procurement systems, which can empower procurement professionals to address critical areas such as spend leakage, contract compliance and missed opportunities.

Supplier collaboration

O9 Solutions

O9 Solutions, an enterprise AI software platform provider for planning and decision-making, is leveraging AI and advanced analytics capabilities to help brands develop real-time, multi-tier supplier collaboration.

The company’s Digital Brain platform aims to enhance the multi-tier supplier collaboration process by delivering end-to-end visibility into supplier data and automating workflows. It facilitates sharing crucial information, such as demand forecasts, production schedules and inventory levels along with external risk and ESG data.

The platform’s advanced analytics and what-if scenario capabilities also can enable companies to identify areas for improvement, anticipate potential issues and implement proactive measures to mitigate risks.

O9 also wants to raise the bar for supplier onboarding. By standardizing processes and procedures, the platform is designed to build trust between customers and suppliers by minimizing errors, reducing waste, streamlining supply chain operations and fostering open lines of communication.

O9’s platform is already being leveraged by enterprises to transform their supplier collaboration processes. Its capabilities, high configurability and AI-driven insights are built to enable CPG, fashion and apparel, high-tech and automotive companies to forge stronger partnerships that can deliver value for all stakeholders.

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