VERA, the Digital Personal Shopping Assistant, Officially Launches at NRF 2019

Vera Is Now Available for Major Retailers Following Successful Pilots with Neiman Marcus and Others

Piktorlabs, a Seattle-based product design company, will be commercially launching VERA, the first-of-its-kind digital personal shopping assistant at NRF 2019. VERA offers a virtual shopping assistant that serves shoppers with matching recommendations inspired by current fashion trends, derived from online media.

VERA engages shoppers across all digital touch points including in-store, e-commerce, mobile apps and desktop to provide a continuous shopping experience. VERA can also integrate with retailer-specific custom implementations such as fitting rooms, self-service counters or team-member apps.

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At its core, VERA’s machine learning algorithms identify customer’s choice of garment, and provide inspiring outfitting recommendations which are based on trending styles in social media and in-store or online availability. The recommendations from VERA are designed to inspire shoppers to explore more options in the form of matching garments, accessories or similar products. Shoppers can also check product availability in the store, request a fitting, order online to be delivered home or simply share the inspirations with friends across messaging or social media platforms.

For retailers, VERA provides valuable real-time insights about shopper preferences, trending brands, popular products segmented by individual stores, locations, timeline (day, week, month, season, year etc). The data provided by VERA can help retailers to make faster decisions related to their operations and customer experience strategy.

After graduating from Target’s Accelerator Program, companies including Neiman Marcus completed successful pilots with VERA to enhance their in-store digital experience.

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“VERA is the first product of its kind to successfully blend physical and digital experiences for retailers in a practical, meaningful way,” states Sreekumar Paramu, CEO of Piktorlabs. “We have been working on VERA in consultation with some of the world’s largest and name-recognizable brands which makes it a robust, mature, deployment-ready product.”

“In our user trials, we saw shoppers getting very excited about the continuous, seamless blending of the digital experience from their mobile phone with an in-store physical kiosk,” Ankit Shekhawat, the inventor and chief architect of VERA states. “VERA’s AI-powered fashion recommendations truly inspire shoppers and helps retailers solve current pain points of successfully blending in-store and digital experiences, recapturing Millennial and Gen Z shoppers, and harnessing social media trends into the shopping experience.”

Piktorlabs is partnering with major retailers to launch VERA in stores beginning in 2019. Visitors to NRF will be able to experience VERA at Piktorlabs’ booth in the Jacob K. Javitz Convention Center, Level 1, Booth #1534 from January 13-15.

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