Ahead of the holiday season, Retail Brew made a trip to Chicago where retail executives spoke candidly about AI search, tariffs, and assortment overhauls at Shoptalk Fall. However, the Windy City’s crisp September weather made retail’s moment of networking gold even better—although not without a jacket.
During the show, we learned that retailers and brands of all sizes have to be invested in testing and being dynamic about AI. Despite the speed of change, prioritizing a smooth customer experience is crucial, top retail executives said during keynote sessions.
The “best metric” for winning within AI-driven search is when “search becomes invisible”—a sign of a seamless customer experience, Ranjeet Bhosale, VP of digital product management at Target, said at Shoptalk.
“The future for us is, at Target, we believe in guest experience,” Bhosale added. “And guest experience is not just about bringing relevant results. It’s also to reduce friction within finding the assortment.”
Bhosale said Target is modernizing its search platform to support longer queries because of the advent of generative AI. “The power and the rate at which GenAI is evolving is exciting, but at the same time relentless,” Bhosale said. Target has also noticed consumers are leaning into longer queries because of the advent of generative AI, he added.
Over the last year, the big box retailer has doubled down on its investments in GEO and modernizing its search platform.
“What this has enabled us to do is make sure that we are supporting the guests with their longer queries,” Bhosale said, “and be able to iterate on that while not impacting our core search experience, making sure that our core product data is right.”
“We are getting ready for a world where the guest may not be directly coming to Target.com but they may be using a shopping assistant externally to browse Target on their behalf,” Bhosale added.
Target is also preparing for agent-to-agent interactions.
Fashion speed: In fashion, AI tools are quickly operating as fashion stylists. For fashion giant H&M, celebrating a quarter century in the US, adapting to this new AI and data-driven world order has meant making pivots to its website, stores, and product offering.
“I’ve really been focused over the past year on how we can elevate the fashion authorization of the brand and really make that experience come to light for our customers, not only with product but also the full shopping experience,” Nicole Parry, head of merchandising of Americas at H&M, said at Shoptalk.
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Within fashion, trend cycles are moving “much faster than they ever did before” prompting bigger changes across all consumer touchpoints, Parry added.
“Maybe you would have had a trend that could last you for a whole season [or] six months. Now, you might need to manage 10 different trends within that period,” she said. “It’s really just not enough to be relevant with your product offer, you need to make sure that you continue that experience through all of the touchpoints that you have with your customer—whether that might be your website, your store, TikTok, Instagram, email.”
Brick and mortar debut: Moving on to fashion for your furniture. For online furniture retailer Wayfair, moving from online to physical retail came in response to what shoppers wanted.
“We really got into physical retail because in the furniture category, the majority of the shopping is still done offline,” Kate Gulliver, CFO and chief administrative officer at Wayfair, said during a keynote at Shoptalk. “Our view was that we wanted to be where our customers are, whether that was online, on the phone, or in the store, we wanted to be present there.”
Gulliver said it was “surprising” to learn that more than 50% of the customers who shopped at Wayfair stores were actually new to its customer file, meaning they had never previously shopped with the retailer, which she said has an active base of 19 million customers.
“There’s definitely a consumer out there who prefers that store experience and needs to have that access point. We’re also finding that some categories that are maybe a little bit more challenging for the shopper to digest online do quite well in the store,” Gulliver added.
When Wayfair planned to go omnichannel, it first tested smaller, 10,000-sq-ft specialty stores featuring curated selections. The company’s moves into the physical store space has led to new learnings like faster delivery speed matters and seasonal merchandise boosts in-store sales.