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In the early 2000s, fashion brands had a realization: They could throw their inventory up on a website and ask customers to sift through it to find what they were looking for. Two decades later, the fundamental structure of e-commerce hasn’t changed much. Shopping is a drag that involves endlessly scrolling for merchandise. [Image: Ralph Lauren] But change is in the air. AI is about to transform everything about online shopping. Consumers are already turning to chatbots to find and compare products, and to platforms like Daydream that are designed specifically for shopping for clothes. Now, we’re about to see how fashion labels themselves can use AI to make shopping on their sites less laborious and more delightful. Today, Ralph Lauren launches Ask Ralph, an AI stylist in the brand’s mobile app. The 58-year-old fashion brand has partnered with Microsoft to create an AI agent that mimics the experience of speaking with an stylist. You begin by expressing exactly what you’re looking for. Depending on the day, it might be specific like, “I’m looking for a black cardigan for the fall,” or open-ended like, “I’m moderating a panel at a big conference and I have no idea what to wear.” [Image: Ralph Lauren] Then, rather than sifting through rows of products, the app does the searching for you. It delivers fully styled looks from the current Ralph Lauren collection that you can shop immediately. And through the process, as you figure out what you’re looking for (say, cropped cardigans made of cashmere), the AI adapts to your preferences. “We’re trying to recreate the experience of working with a well-trained Ralph Lauren salesperson,” says David Lauren, chief branding and innovation officer at Ralph Lauren, and son of the founder. “We’ve taken all of our own best practices and built them into the AI.” [Image: Ralph Lauren] An Early Adopter This isn’t Ralph Lauren’s first partnership with Microsoft. Twenty-five years ago, David appeared on stage with Bill Gates to unveil Polo.com, the very first Ralph Lauren website. This was a time when few other fashion brands had any online presence at all. David has always been interested in adopting new technologies early. Shortly after the new website debuted, David partnered with NBC to build an online magazine full of videos and articles to blend content with commerce; in the following years, it would become common for brands to launch blogs on their website. And Ralph Lauren was among the first fashion brand to place QR codes in billboard and print ads to send consumers to its website. “We did this before most phones were able to read QR codes,” says David. “But people quickly caught up.” Ralph Lauren has been toying with the idea of a digital stylist for a long time. In the early 2000s, that early version of the e-commerce website had an “Ask Ralph” feature, where you could read content about how to put a Ralph Lauren look together, and even a video streaming service where you could talk to a salesperson in a showroom. “What we didn’t have at the time was AI,” David says. “We realized that AI could help us realize many of the concepts we had dreamt about back then.” To train the Ask Ralph model, Microsoft used data from Ralph Lauren’s archives and current collections to help identify the brand’s distinct aesthetic. Ralph Lauren’s creative team, from designers to in-store stylists, participated in the process to make sure that the app would create highly curated looks that reflect the brand’s take on styling. Then, members of the in-store team were asked to contribute insights about how they work with a customer to help them find pieces. Once they had created a beta version of the app, they asked employees to use it and offer feedback. The final version of the app uses conversational AI and natural language processing to understand open-ended prompts from the user. It also incorporates the customer’s shopping history, so that it can understand their preferences and pick pieces that match what they already have in their closet. The app can interpret context: It can identify whether the customer is trying to quickly buy a shirt to match an existing blazer, or whether they are just playing around to find new ideas for outfits. It also only shows pieces of clothing that are currently available for purchase, and over time, the app will adapt to the user. [Photo: Ralph Lauren] The Industry Shift While Ralph Lauren is an early adopter of AI technology, many fashion brands are building their own apps, says Shelley Bransten, corporate VP of global industry solutions at Microsoft. She says that the fashion industry is now shifting from “scroll-based” shopping, which involves looking through rows of thumbnails, to “goal-based” shopping, which deploys AI to surface results based on the customer’s specific needs at that moment. “The shopping experience is going to be more personalized, relevant, and more tied to the customer’s intent,” she says. Bransten says that many consumers have gotten so used to using AI agents like ChatGPT that they no longer remember how to use search boxes on websites. Instead, they type out full queries into search boxes, only to confuse the system. But companies that have made the leap to using AI on their e-commerce sites are already seeing more success. “They’re seeing higher conversion rates, units per transaction, and consumer happiness scores,” she says. [Photo: Ralph Lauren] At the same time, we should expect more general AI agents to improve. I recently wrote about Daydream, a shopping platform that allows you to describe what it is you’re looking for, then searches for pieces from hundreds of brands. It will tailor the results to your size, personal preferences, and budget. Soon, platforms like this are likely to replace searching for clothes on Google, but David believes that some customers will still want to search directly on brand websites. “We have loyal, long-term customers who trust us,” he says. “Ask Ralph is another way to deepen this relationship.” Ask Ralph is designed to make shopping less time-consuming for the customer, but David also believes it is an opportunity for Ralph Lauren to stand out by emphasizing the brand’s unique point of view. The app will curate looks that are very carefully aligned with the distinct Ralph Lauren aesthetic, and in doing so, will allow customers to enter the brand’s universe. “Our customers come to us because they like our point of view,” David says. “We can help them create the look that they want more directly.” The app could also be a way to bring new customers in. While it is designed to make the purchasing process easier, David hopes that it is also a useful free tool for anyone looking for help to get dressed in the morning. If you already have a blue blazer and turn to the Ask Ralph app for interesting ways to style it, the app will curate looks drawn from Ralph Lauren’s archives and style guide. “People still read fashion magazines and blogs to look for tips about how to dress,” David says. “I think of the Ask Ralph app as a kind of style book. It helps you figure out how to put a look together in the morning.”
Category:
E-Commerce
Weve had branded entertainment since Proctor and Gamble invented soap operas back in the 1930s. But as media fragmentation has gone into hyperdrive over the past two decades, brands have been forced to diversify the ways in which they gain and hold our attention. Its no longer viable or effective to overly depend on traditional paid media tools. Marketers can create content and experiences that attract and engage audiences rather than interrupt and annoy themand drive results. Some of the best examples of this is what we call brand entertainment. Brands of all stripes talk about it, but it is the exceptions that truly invest in making actual entertainment. Of course, theres box office hits like Barbie, The Lego Movie, and Super Mario Bros, but theres also classics like BMWs The Hire (2002), Red Bull “Stratos” from 2012, and the 2014 Patagonia doc DamNation. Dicks Sporting Goods has been funding and producing award-winning content for years. Over the past decade, the retailer has built an impressive catalog of five feature-length films and 10 short-form or episodic documentaries. Its 2014 doc We Could Be King premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, streamed on Netflix, and won the 2015 Sports Emmy Award for Outstanding Sports Documentary. It won its second Sports Emmy for a doc called The Turnaround last year. In August, it premiered its newest documentary, Big Dreams: The Little League World Series 2024, produced in partnership with Imagine Entertainment and MLB Studios. Soon after, it officially announced an in-house studio division called Cookie Jar & A Dream Studios, to formalize its commitment to entertainment as a pillar of its brand. On this months episode of Brand New World, Im talking to Dicks chief marketing officer Emily Silver about why now is the perfect time for an in-house studio, how they measure success on projects, and where it all goes from here. How the new in-house studio will impact how it invests in entertainment: First, you’ll see us take a more aggressive stance in the number of films and pieces of content we put out. Two, it helps us brand the studio so that we start to build more of a name for ourselves in the [entertainment] industry and attract different writers and different projects, which is already happening. And three, it gives us the opportunity to put a little more structure and framework around what content we want to produce and where we want to lean in to help build for the long term. It really just helps formalize the process in a way that we can be a little more choice-ful about what we want to do in the future. How the brand evaluates potential entertainment projects: For us, it’s really making sure that the story that we’re going to tell, or whoever we’re partnering with is going to tell, really fits with our values and our point of view on sports, which is the power to change lives and build community. It really has to click those two boxes, and we want to tell transformative stories that highlight grit and raw humanity and heartbreak in the lessons learned behind sports.Advice for marketers curious about entertainment: There’s a lot of money out there and you can see how this can go very wrong and very commercial very quickly. My advice would be to hold to your creative standards, and find people who think similarly to you about creative excellence. It really is about finding that match of people that you’d want to write with, and want to produce, and direct with. Making sure that your vision, and the mission of the company and the team align. Because there’s endless content out there. As we all know, the trick is getting people to care and to watch it.
Category:
E-Commerce
Nebius Group said on Monday it will provide Microsoft with GPU infrastructure capacity, in a deal worth $17.4 billion, over a five-year term, sending its shares soaring over 47% after the bell. The deal underscores the surging demand for high-performance AI computers, as companies invest heavily to bolster their AI infrastructure. Microsoft may also acquire additional services capacity under the deal, bringing the total contract value to about $19.4 billion. Nebius’ core business involves providing Nvidia graphic processing units and AI cloud as services. Nebius offers AI developers the computing, storage, managed services and tools they need to build, tune and run their AI models, with the help of its cloud software architecture and in-house designed hardware. Nebius will provide Microsoft access to dedicated GPU infrastructure capacity from its new data center in Vineland, New Jersey, starting later this year. “The economics of the deal are attractive in their own right, but, significantly, the deal will also help us to accelerate the growth of our AI cloud business even further in 2026 and beyond,” Nebius CEO Arkady Volozh said. Microsoft is the largest customer of CoreWeave one of Nebius’ competitors which earlier this year denied media reports that said it had seen contract cancellations from the hyperscaler. Amsterdam-based Nebius Group emerged from a deal to split the assets of Russian tech giant Yandex. Juby Babu, Reuters
Category:
E-Commerce
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