Top Things You Missed IN Retail

Backed by luxury retailer Farfetch and VC firm Outlier Ventures, Dream Assembly Base Camp is one of the largest web3 accelerators in luxury fashion. Now kicking off the third part of the program, it’s providing new insight into emerging opportunities for brands around digital fashion and the metaverse.

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CommerceIQ has worked with Instant Brands to enable the company to help to scale and profitably grow its retail ecommerce business. Instant Brands was able to reach its ecommerce growth targets by consolidating its retail ecommerce tech stack with CommerceIQ’s all-in-one platform.

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Chemical and cosmetics company Kao has revamped their online sales, logistics and return-order processes with a view to keeping up with rising e-commerce demand. Kao recruited the help of management and technology consultancy BearingPoint to navigate the return-order tasks upgrade.

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In Egypt, small firms, including mom-and-pop stores, make up about 90% of local food and grocery sector, with the “Walmarts and the Walgreens of Egypt only representing a very tiny portion of the market,” says Belal el Megharbel, co-founder and CEO at Cairo-based business-to-business (B2B) eCommerce startup MaxAB.

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Hotelier Village Hotels said it has partnered with Attensi to deliver open pathway game-based training. The new initiative allows employees to receive cross-department training and develop the skills needed to work within different areas of the business.

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Kingfisher is to deploy Fluent Commerce’s Order Management System (OMS), with the aim of supporting the Group’s online retail business and enhancing customer experience. 

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Supermarket giant Foodstuffs is trialling facial recognition technology across its North Island stores as the rates of theft, burglary, robbery and other crimes continue to soar. The chain said the move was an attempt "to proactively reduce serious incidents in stores and meet our safety responsibilities to customers and team".

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With around 300 locations across the Southeast U.S., 106 of which are franchises, Krystal Restaurants counts on frequent quality assessments to ensure guests have comparable encounters with the brand no matter where they go. The brand felt there was room to improve with respect to its limited auditing platform. It didn’t have a way to close the loop on assigned items, so incident resolution was time-consuming and accuracy wasn’t guaranteed.

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Window shopping has taken on a high-tech spin in New York City this holiday season. Beginning Wednesday, November 23, select retail windows in the city will stream live shopping programs through the holiday season. Livestream commerce platform TalkShopLive is partnering with digital media technology provider FrontRunner Technologies to deliver what the companies are calling the first-ever “live commerce window shopping experience.”

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Kneaders, the Utah-based award-winning fast-casual bakery and cafe chain, announced the results of their revamped loyalty program in partnership with Thanx, the leading loyalty and guest engagement platform. The re-launch of Kneaders loyalty program allows the brand to leverage the entire suite of enhanced platform capabilities now available with the release of Thanx’s new loyalty 3.0 engine.

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ASAP.com has announced a national food delivery agreement with Chipotle Mexican Grill. Effective immediately, ASAP.com will begin delivery from Chipotle restaurants in many markets.

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Nike has launched .Swoosh, a Web 3-enabled digital platform that will let Nike fans learn, collect and eventually co-create virtual creations such as virtual shoes or jerseys.

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UK independent retailer, Guy Warner, has got onboard with food waste app, Gander, by installing its technology in his latest flagship store in Upton-Upon-Severn.

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Perfect Corp. has extended its partnership with beauty brand Avon, to roll-out a virtual try-on online shopping experience in nine initial markets.

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Pepperfry, an e-commerce home goods company, headquartered in Mumbai, India, is working with FarEye to simplify last mile delivery, particularly for oversized deliveries requiring installation.

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Starship Technologies has partnered with Leeds City Council and the Co-op to bring autonomous grocery delivery to the streets of Leeds.

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Since fuel revenue has historically been so significant for c-stores, the migration to EVs means convenience stores must reinvent themselves. This means transitioning from a grab-and-go model that's a 10-minute stop — where customers gas up their cars, then grab cigarettes, beer and a prepackaged snack for the road — to a destination, where they hang out for an hour or more to shop, eat, work and charge their cars.

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Pricer’s partner StrongPoint has inked a frame agreement with Løvenskiold Handel to supply and install Pricer electronic shelf labels at its Maxbo stores in Norway.

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According to results of a survey of 1,420 IT executives, many of whom were retailers, released exclusively to Chain Store Age by Rackspace Technology, there has been a 59% increase in IT investment by retail respondents during 2022. Many retail respondents also intend to make further investment in IT strategies over the next 12-18 months in the cloud (75%), security (57%) and digital transformation (48%).

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On November 14th, Hilton released its 2023 trends report:The 2023 Traveler: Emerging Trends that are Innovating the Travel Experience.According to Hilton’s global survey of 7,000 travelers, an analysis of current travel trends indicates that guests are looking for a balance of technological and human innovations, deeper connections and care, as well as embedded wellness experiences.

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Jet’s Pizza crossed the $100 million mark for orders made utilizing artificial intelligence. The Detroit-Style Pizza chain began exploring AI technology in the fall of 2019. Since then, they have introduced text ordering, pro-ordering, and a phone bot.

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ReceiptHero and Lagardére Travel Retail are teaming up to deploy a digital receipt solution to the latter’s UK stores.

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Lifetime Brands, Traeger Grills, and Whole Foods have all signed on for AWS’s new supply chain platform.  The cloud app, which is currently in preview in select U.S. regions and European regions, is designed to increase supply chain visibility by combining and analyzing data across multiple supply chain systems to provide manufacturers and retailers with real-time information. 

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Marks and Spencer says that it has reduced workplace incidents by 80% just 10 weeks after introducing AI driven health and safety technology from Protex AI to its distribution centre in Castle Donington.

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Lolli users can now earn Bitcoin rewards at every Burger King in America.

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“Small Business Saturday” turned out to be a good day to spot a growing effort by one very big business to shrink its carbon footprint. Across Seattle, GeekWire spotted Amazon’s distinct electric delivery vans made by Rivian. The tech giant began rolling out the vans in Seattle and select U.S. cities this summer, but spotting them in the wild has still been a bit of a rare occurrence.

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UK tech retailer, Currys, says it has invested over £250,000 in a fleet of robotic exoskeleton suits to help colleagues from logistics partner, GXO, work safely and efficiently through the festive period.

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Grocery Outlet has moved from a pilot to a major regional rollout by deploying Axiom Cloud’s "apps for refrigeration" to 79 stores throughout California. Axiom's apps will be used to enhance refrigeration uptime, reduce refrigerant leak rates, and generate new revenue through automated demand response. In the first three months of operation, the apps have already helped Grocery Outlet stores save $418,000 on energy bills and maintenance costs.

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The beauty company has partnered with artificial intelligence and NLP provider Yseop to leverage its iClosing enterprise automation platform, according to a press release. The technology is designed to quickly provide language and visual insights to 2,000 users around the world, enabling L'Oréal’s financial controllers to more easily identify business-driving insights. 

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Lowe’s has converted eight regions, covering more than half of its stores, to a more efficient delivery model for big and bulky products. In the home improvement retailer’s legacy delivery model for large products, each store functions as a step in the distribution process, with store-based delivery trucks and associates delivering products. In its new, market delivery model, large products skip stores on their way to the customer, reducing touches and freeing up storage space at stores.

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Marks and Spencer has bought the intellectual property of Thread, the fashion personalisation website which recently went into administration.

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The company’s proprietary insights framework leverages predictive analytics to support retailers lacking reliable historical data, at times developing custom collaborations to fit specific needs. It now covers 110 million households and more than 500,000 retail outlets, Kate Garner, PepsiCo SVP marketing, demand accelerator, tells CGT, and PepsiCo is heading into the new year with a particular focus on the shifting value paradigm at retail. 

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Scientific Games will provide the company's latest WAVE point-of-sale technology across Atlantic Lottery's retailer network of 3,000 locations in the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador. The technology modernization is part of Atlantic Lottery's retail rejuvenation through a new contract with Scientific Games, which also includes other equipment and software.

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As part of a broader upgrade to its online shopping experience, Stater Bros. Markets is launching a new, natively developed mobile app running on a platform from grocery e-commerce solutions provider Mercatus. Seeking to offer a fully integrated online ordering and fulfillment experience, the retailer can now offer curbside and white-label delivery options provided by Instacart to app users.

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Vallarta is the first retailer to roll out Logile’s IMS Suite in combination with its industry-leading Workforce Management Suite. Powered by Logile’s superior forecasting accuracy, the unified IMS & Workforce Management solutions will enable retailers to have a single, comprehensive, end-to-end solution set for store-level planning, scheduling and execution. One Store. One Forecast. One Labor. One Inventory. One Bold Solution.

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Victoria’s Secret & Co. is rolling out new technology to help customers find the right size when shopping on the brand’s app for Victoria’s Secret and Victoria’s Secret Pink bras.

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Collect&Go, Colruyt Group’s online shopping service, is trialling an autonomous vehicle built by Clevon that combines remote teleoperation with autopilot functionality.

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Quick-delivery platform Food Rocket has arrived in Charlotte, N.C., with the launch of its operations at two area Circle K stores. Through its app, Food Rocket offers up to 7,000 SKUs, with an emphasis on grocery and convenience products – Circle K’s breakfast sandwiches, tacos, burgers, pizza, coffee, snacks and bakery products – as well as hundreds of cold beverages, top-selling beers and nicotine products, local favorites, and more. All orders will go out from two micro-fulfillment centers .

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Jack in the Box Inc.’s digital investments for 2023 include a new point-of-sale system.

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Jumbo, the second largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands which also has stores in Belgium, has announced an exclusive electronic shelf labels partnership with Hanshow.

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Macy’s has converted space in 35 of its stores to serve as mini distribution centers (DCs) for online orders as the retailer anticipates a continuation of strong digital demand.

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To support is continuing strategy of aggressive growth, Psycho Bunny is implementing the distributed order management system (OMS) from Fluent Commerce to handle its retail and wholesale inventory with one solution in the U.S. and Canada.

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Customers across central London using Uber Eats will now be able to order from Zapp’s catalogue of around 2,000 products. Each order will be picked and packed from the nearest ‘Zappstore’ for delivery within as little as 20 minutes, 24/7. Zapp says that this makes it one of the only convenience retailers available on Uber Eats night and day.

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With Black Friday and Cyber Monday just around the corner, leading retail innovators Brooklinen, Marquee Brands, Paperless Post, Snipes, and Bohemian Mama are leveraging fabric Marketplace to create exceptional and differentiated customer experiences as we enter retail’s most wonderful time of the year.

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Retailers ranging from Walmart to Barnes & Noble are installing cameras or locking away items to deter shoplifters and thieves as they brace for a post-pandemic rush of holiday shoppers this year. Some, including Walmart, J.C. Penney and Walgreens, put in place new surveillance systems or more security guards. Others, like Target and Barnes & Noble, sealed merchandise behind plexiglass or tethered it with steel cables to store shelves.

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Unilever has been transforming its supply chain strategy, embracing what it calls groundbreaking technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and satellite imaging, that are improving transparency and traceability with sustainability at the forefront. 

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