How to Convert Your Offline Fashion & Lifestyle Store Into an AI-Enabled Store? Like Azorte?

In 2023, the fashion industry is expected to grow to $768.70 billion, and with a CAGR of about 9.45%, it will reach $1,103 billion by 2027. These figures depict fashion as a need of today!

“Sustainable Fashion is Not A Choice, It’s A Necessity” one said!

With the increasing demand for offline shopping, the retail sector has emerged with a new shopping experience for its customers. Imagine going to an AI-infused offline fashion and lifestyle store, picking the items you need, and coming out in no time. This concept may sound new to some, but it has already penetrated the offline fashion world. Azorte, an emerging fashion brand, has already started its journey to revolutionize Indian shops. 

The major parameter backing the fashion market to grow is advanced technologies, like Artificial Intelligence. Yes, AI and other technologies are transforming this industry in almost every division, from design to manufacturing, marketing, and logistic supply chain.

How? You need to go through this post to know how manufacturers in the fashion industry worldwide can leverage the best out of AI technology, its role, and its impact. 

Let’s get deeper!

What is an AI-Enabled Fashion & Lifestyle Offline Store?

On the retail landscape, when a fashion and lifestyle offline store integrates AI and other emerging technologies, it becomes an AI-enabled fashion and lifestyle offline store that redefines the future of shopping. By easing the customers, boosting their social engagement, and providing them with numerous choices, such stores create immersive and personalized shopping experiences. 

Eyeing on the latest statistics, online shopping is usually preferred today, but offline mode has yet to leave the stage. In 2022, around 2/3rd of fashion purchases were done offline. The offline resale market in the US was $101.2 billion in 2022 and is likely to reach $350 billion. 

In fashion retail, AI and ML arrive with automated solutions that help monitor customers’ shopping activities and witness their behavior to know their preferences for specific products and their dislikes. 

Besides, in retail shops, AI records the customer’s shopping experiences or tracks footfalls to get feedback on their shopping experience at the retail shops with possible improvement. 

Azorte – A New Venture to Witness AI-Infused Shopping Experience 

Azorte is a premium, high-street fashion and lifestyle retailer store founded by the Ambani family that sells products from varied categories, like clothing, accessories, jewelry, and more. It rolled out with a limitless fashion assortment to let consumers experience online and offline. Maybe it sounds similar to other offline fashion stores, but its unique and all-in-new features will make it exceptional, like:

• Smart trial rooms
• QR-enabled screens for details sharing,
• Self-checkout stations, 
• In-store navigation
• Virtual try-on

How AI Is Changing Retail – Facts & Figures

Retailers are increasingly adopting AI and progressing in the market. Let’s check out some statistics proving the point. 

• In 2023, AI in the retail market is likely to reach $29.45 billion at a CAGR of 32.17% from 2023 to 2028. 
• By 2032, AI in the retail market will grow to $48.64 billion.
• AI adoption in the retail industry is predicted to increase in the next three years and reach 80%.
• According to 81% of top retail business players, AI is completely functional in their organization. 

How to Convert Your Offline Fashion & Lifestyle Store Into an AI-Enabled Store – The Process

1. Grab Knowledge About AI in Offline Fashion Retail Stores

From designing attires to predicting customers’ preferences. AI is changing the way fashion is produced, consumers, and marketed. 

Besides AI, various other technologies are also used in the retail sector, like machine learning, NLP, and computer vision for varied applications, such as product recommendations, demand forecasting, fraud detection, etc. 

2. Assessing Offline Store

Ahead, you should conduct a deep assessment of your existing offline retail store and pick the needs for improving it by infusing AI. It will boost your customer experiences and operations. Next, consider the budget required and resources for AI implementation solutions. 

3. Choosing the Right AI Technologies

Learn and discuss varied AI technologies that suit your offline fashion retail business best, like inventory management systems, recommendation engines, and chatbots. Consider your business needs and budget to choose AI solutions accordingly that can benefit your store perfectly. 

4. Data Collection and Preparation

For AI implementation, customer data accumulation is important and relevant to their behavior, sales history, and store inventory. This will help you attain the expected outcomes by implementing the best suitable AI solutions in your business. Besides, target security and data privacy considerations also keep your store well-protected from any sort of issue. 

5. AI Solutions Implementation

Analyze the process of AI technologies integration in your offline fashion retail store sequentially, covering almost all the business requirements like hardware and software needs, installation, and vendor selection. Also, ensure your staff is well-trained for successful AI adoption into your business. This way, you can exploit the most out of this technology that will help increase sales and revenue. 

6. Improving Customer Experience

You should clear up how AI implementation can help enhance and personalize your customer’s shopping experience. Remember to consider AI-chatbot implementation for customer support that can accurately and quickly resolve issues and answer your customers’ queries. 

Amazon, IKEA, and more stores use AI-infused recommendation systems that recommend products to customers based on their previous searches and purchasing history. 

7. Streamlining Offline Store Operations

Next, you should describe how advanced technology and artificial intelligence can optimize your supply chain and inventory management processes. Moreover, consider discussing the AI usage for stick replenishment and demand forecasting. Aim at case studies highlighting the success of varied stores through AI. 

8. Track & Measure Success

Find ways to track and measure AI’s impact on your offline fashion retail store. Check the key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor your store’s sales growth, cost saving, and customer satisfaction. Post-data analysis, you should suggest ways to improve varied aspects demanding enhancement. 

9. Beat the Pitfalls & Challenges

Before you witness any pitfalls and issues while implementing AI in the retail industry, you should discuss the common ones to be set to invade them. Besides, you should prepare shore-shot strategies that can help you beat such issues if they emerge while implementing AI in a retail store. Also, share the tactics one can consider to stay protected from such lags. 

10. Future Perspectives

You should also keep exploring emerging AI technologies and trends in the fashion industry. Also, you must stay updated with the changing AI landscape and create strategies to adopt them in your business seamlessly. 

Following the above-mentioned process, you can be set to seamlessly and accurately implement AI solutions in your fashion retail store with minimum to no issues or problems. 

Features to Include in AI-Enabled Fashion & Lifestyle Offline Store

1. Cashier Shopping

Using an in-store shopping app, a visitor scans a QR code at the entrance to enter the AI-powered fashion retail store and starts picking the needed items. Each stock, integrated with in-store cameras and sensors when picked from the shelf, adds up to the customer’s virtual cart. In case he puts it back, the shopping cart updates automatically. After that, when they exit the store, their app takes them to an integrated payment gateway or e-wallet, where they pay for their purchases. 

Benefit: Saves customers’ time, which makes them repeat customers. 

Example: Amazon Go, rolled out in December 2016, runs on “Just Walk Out” technology, including sensor fusion, deep learning algorithms, and computer vision, where customers witness checkout-free shopping experiences. 

2. Personalization & AI Integration

AI-enabled fashion & lifestyle offline stores can also offer personalized shopping recommendations to the visitors at the store when integrated with personalization and AI technology. 

Benefits: Customers get what they want per their choices, which boosts sales and ROI. 

Example: Azorte, a high-street apparel brand launched in September 2022 in Bengaluru, analyzes customer browsing behavior, preferences, and purchase history to customize their product offerings, discounts, and promotions to meet their unique tastes. 

3. Virtual Shopping Assistants

AI-infused fashion retail stores can improve customer support service by implementing virtual shopping assistants powered by natural language processing (NLP) potential. 

Benefits: Quick issue resolution and faster response time. 

Example: Azorte provides virtual shopping assistance to its customers, available 24/7 to resolve their issues or queries, provide product recommendations, and be with them through their shopping venture. Chatbot integration streamlines the process and ensures rapid problem resolution. 

4. Customer Locator

The moment visitors enter the AI-powered store, the associated app starts tracking their location until they exit. 

Benefits: Improves customer experiences and helps them make sound decisions, which increases revenue. 

Example: Amazon Go uses custom camera hardware to calculate the distance between visitors, creating a location map utilizing triangulation across multiple cameras. 

5. Product ID Detection

However, item identification is easy but may lead to issues if two distinct flavors of the same brand are picked. Here, residual neural networks can help distinguish between items that perform refined item recognition. 

Benefits: Ease in distinguishing between the items in the cart, which may be from the same company but are of different costs. 

6. Predictive Analytics

AI-enabled fashion retail stores can emerge with predictive analytics reports, which help predict sales based on customers’ purchase history, interactions, preferences, and more. This way, store owners can boost their ROI while keeping their customers happier. 

Benefits: Leads to enhanced customer experiences to showcase what they want per their choice and preferences. 

7. In-Store Navigation

The use of navigation-relevant technologies, like interactive kiosks, can improve the retail experience. It lets the customers easily locate what they are searching specific to colors and products. 

Benefits: Faster product search, saving time, and boosting sales.

8. Smart Trail Rooms

Technology-embed fitting rooms that offer customers an interactive and personalized shopping experience, the smart trail rooms will be a major parameter of attractions for customers. You can make smart trial rooms set for styling tips and product recommendations by including mood lighting, cameras, and sensors for garment recognition. 

Benefits: It helps customers make informed buying decisions and lets retailers get customers’ behavior and preferences data. 

Example: Azorte has already installed smart trial rooms at their AI-based stores that provide an improved shopping experience to customers. They only scan using their mobile and are good to go with self-checkout kiosks. 

9. Geo Targeting/Beacon Technology

A low-energy Bluetooth device, beacon technology permits retailers to deliver personalized experiences to shoppers by sending product details, targeted promotions, and other marketing texts at an apt time. 

Benefits: Real-time promotion and discount messages will boost sales. 

10. Recycling Technology

By installing recycling technology with AI-enabled fashion retail stores, the owners can support improving sustainability, reducing waste, increasing customer footfall, improving brand image, getting access to more revenue streams, and saving costs. 

Benefits: Recycling technology attracts and retains environment-friendly customers. 

11. Virtual Try-Ons

With such a feature, the customers at the store can check out their look in new and latest outfits without even trying them virtually. 

Benefits: Customers will find it less tiring and more convenient.

12. Metaverse Integration

As the metaverse attracts new revenue streams, retailers with good funds can partner with gaming platforms to craft a virtual world for the shoppers. Besides, they can show their metaverse collection to in-store shoppers. 

Benefits: Ease shopping experience. 

Example: Jack & Jones stores let their shoppers witness in-store banner branding in a completely new avatar. 

How Emizentech Can Help You?

AI in retail stores is helpful in easing shopping experiences and boosting sales and ROI. This demands implementing AI into offline fashion and lifestyle stores, for which you can hire an AI consulting company. 

Besides, the merchants find this new concept complicated when it comes to managing such stores. Here, a mobile app can ease their AI-infused retail store management. 

To build custom Software for handling AI-powered stores, you can hire an experienced Software development company. While considering expertise, look only as far as Emizentech, holding a team of professional Software developers who are experienced at accomplishing varied successful software development projects. 

Top Highlights

• Dedicated towards projects
• Better communication skills.
• Creative ability to resolve issues. 
• Craft an engaging user experience.

Wrapping Lines

Walk, grab and go! No lines, no checkout, and no registers. Doesn’t it sound soothing? Considering the process we have included in this post, you can also witness this by implementing AI in your retail store’s fashion and lifestyle and increasing your sales and revenue. 

Besides, you can also build an AI mobile app for your AI-enabled fashion retail store and manage your business seamlessly. 

Hire expert app developers and start your project now!