More than 50 startups have presented innovations designed to renew and innovate the world of fashion retail, and beyond, in recent years at the Innovation Village Retail at Expo Riva Schuh & Gardabags. While waiting to find out what the next hot topics proposed during the January 2025 edition of the Riva del Garda event will be, we asked the players from past editions for their opinion on how much weight the personalization of products and shopping experiences has in today’s marketing.
Francesco Carpineti, CCO & Co-Founder of Future Fashion by Zakeke Group, frames the theme: “Personalization means getting closer to consumers and speaking their language, either by structuring shopping experiences that showcase products that meet their tastes as much as possible, or through experiences that bind the consumer to the brand beyond the product, allowing the consumer to co-create or personalize exclusive lines in which they can fully recognize themselves. A process that benefits increased conversions into sales, consumer loyalty to the brand, and higher average shopping carts.”
Getting closer to the customer’s point of view is also important for Giovanni Alberto Sala, Chief Commercial Strategy at Tokenance: “We believe that the new era of marketing involves a direct conversation with the customer or brand fan. As if brands no longer belong to the shareholders but to the people who, also through social, affect the expectations of brand strategy development. Web3’s technologies (blockchain, digital twin, Digital Product Passport) combined with AI (management side to improve data mining and customer side to innovate the sales ritual by enabling direct and surgical research with respect to people’s interests) are the two tools to create a digital relationship with the customer by raising the level of product assurance, with a certified supply chain and fostering direct and dynamic communication with the customer.”
Of Artificial Intelligence, and the relationship between guided and generative ones, Josh Behar, VP Strategic Accounts and BD of Tymely, a startup that won the last Startup Competition in Riva del Garda: “We talk about personalized interactions. Through intelligent decision trees and personalized integrations, guided AI tailors shopping experiences to individual customer preferences, something that generative AI struggles to achieve with the same precision. In fact, guided AI anticipates buyer needs, driving sales through proactive recommendations. This targeted approach often outperforms the broader applications of generative AI in creating direct sales and customer satisfaction results. Moreover, by analyzing specific purchase data, guided AI continually refines its methods, ensuring that each customer interaction is more effective than the last. In summary, guided AI’s specialization in business-to-customer interactions provides: highly personalized shopping experiences; more cost-effective operations by reducing the need for massive human intervention; and opportunities for human agents to focus on complex problems and direct customer interactions. In comparison, generative AI offers broad applications, but lacks the focused approach that online retailers need.”
But is all that glitters gold? If personalization in the sales experience is so crucial, why isn’t everyone adopting it? Try to answer Omar Fogliadini, managing partner of LIFEdata.AI S.A.: “We have been working on hyper-personalization since our founding, but we have always encountered two types of limitations. Structural: companies do not have systems with proper data organization that allows for effective personalization. Cultural: in Italy, data literacy is very low and there is a lack of proposals addressed to correct incentive dynamics towards users for sharing data versus the benefit provided. It is only mentioned for promotions.
Analyzing the responses of the startups reveals one last interesting fact: simplicity must be at the heart of any system dedicated to personalization, whether of product or the shopping experience.
To achieve the goal Zakeke – a visual commerce platform that enables the creation of digital twins of products to be used in 3D configurator, augmented reality, virtual wearable experiences – uses artificial intelligence so that the end customer can query the system that will respond with the best configuration of that product according to the features requested by the customer.
Tokenance is very explicit on the topic: “We want to meet new customer needs by creating a new way of contact through digital relationships that innovate the sales ritual. We do this complexity free, with easy-to-adopt solutions for both customers and company management that positively and immediately impact the approach to digital business development.”
Similar is the response from LIFEdata.AI: “We deal with data and AI solutions for simplifying the sales journey. We simplify the work of sales staff with a familiar tool like WhatsApp, but empowered with data-driven personalization processes behind the scenes so that the WhatsApp medium becomes a data pipeline, a precursor to AI.”
For Tymely, a personalized response to customer requests must not only be simple, but also fast and profitable for the brand. Indeed, entrusting customer service to advanced systems saves on staff, makes it possible to be available any day or time, and converts a problem into a sales opportunity.
To discover the many innovative visions on the future of retail proposed by other startups, the appointment is January 11-14, 2025 at Expo Riva Schuh & Gardabags with the new edition of the Innovation Village Retail.
