Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield’s “How We Shop” platform creates an Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered concept fashion store of the future with live trending items around the clock.
In addition, the store supports Save the Children with 100 live trending products for the charity’s Centenary year.
Westfield London has opened “The Trending Store”, the first ever bricks-and-mortar fashion boutique selling only what is trending online in real time, via the power of AI machine learning, following a partnership with trends experts Next Atlas. The store opened for a four-day period until 7 July 2019 in association with long-standing charity partner Save the Children, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year.
The digital world makes it easier to shop for what’s hotter than ever before. Curated looks are just a click away, delivery times are quicker than ever, and social media even lets us shop for what’s trending right off our favourite influencers’ backs, in an instant. But how can people be sure that what they buy on screen looks great in real life?
The Trending Store, a “How We Shop” concept store of the future, opened for four days only at Westfield London. It was created in response to shoppers’ needs, bringing together the smart intel of online shopping and the human interaction of shopping ‘in real life’ for the first time. How We Shop is Westfield’s retail research and trends platform, now in its sixth year.
The store has been created in partnership with AI trend experts Nextatlas, whose intelligent machine learning model identifies ‘trend originators’ from across the web. Spotting influencers who are early adopters of key trends – Nextatlas can track what they’re wearing and in turn creates and collates trends as they happen, while also predicting the future of fashion.
The store will be powered by this live data, serving up 100 trending items to celebrate Save the Children’s 100 years of doing whatever it takes to protect vulnerable children around the world. The Trending Store will hold ever changing fashion looks based on what people are wearing right now, catering for budgets big and small.
Stylists will be on hand to hunt out looks as instructed by Nextatlas’ AI technology, to stock the store each day, and they will also be on hand inside the store to help customers pick out key items to suit their own individual styles.
Myf Ryan, CMO Europe and Group Director of Brand and Strategic Marketing for Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield. “One of the biggest industry trends is the merging of online and physical retail. We know that the UK is shopping online, but we’re also seeing and hearing from consumers that they crave the human factor that shopping in person provides – the ability to touch, feel, try and seek advice, to ensure the products are right for you. The Trending Store provides the best of both worlds via a unique shopping experience, one that we believe represents the way we will all be shopping in the future.”
Mario Coletti, Managing Director at Nextatlas comments: “Traditional retailers have always used stores to gather customer information. The Trending Store is revolutionising store management by using Nextatlas’ platform to make stores a destination of data science rather than a source of it. It’s a pioneering example of how AI will be relevant for customers as well as a way to make stores more effective in generating enhanced customer experiences.”
