Innovative Merchandising Technologies

Amazon Style was a tech enabled retail store with a fashion showroom. Fixtures in-store had only one clothing item that would be displayed, with all of the other sizes and colors in the back. This was not common among apparel retailers, and it presented unique challenges on how to curate and display product in store. My challenge was to enable this merchandising strategy through digital tooling.

 

Problem

  • Visual Merchandisers (VM) didn’t have any physical inventory to curate the store’s showroom but needed to show store teams where/how to place in showroom

  • In-store Visual Merchandisers (ISVM) needed to replace items from the showroom that sold out and weren’t visually cohesive

  • Store Employees needed to know exactly where to put the clothing per VM recommendations during seasonal Changeovers

Goals

  • Bias for simple solutions and delivery speed to improve merchandising processes as fast as possible

  • Improve Corporate VM workflow upstream first, to reduce hours spent in curation and time to execute Seasonal Changeovers

  • Leverage existing tooling whenever possible

Solution
Merchandising Web Tool that supports digital selection and curation paired with a handheld tool for showroom updates and moves. Use existing platform tool for store Changeovers.

Impact

  • Corporate VM can now find and digitally curate clothing items using the tool with a 90% reduction in time spent on curation

  • ISVM can move and replace product across the showroom to keep the store cohesive

Role

  • Research

  • Design Strategy

  • Interaction & UI Design

Team

  • Product Manager

  • Visual Merchandising Team

  • R&D Operations

  • Engineering

Duration
2021 - 2023

My Design Process

When I began working on this project the first store had just launched. The Visual Merchandising team had scrappily put together Excel sheets and powerpoint tools to curate the intial store selection but this wouldn’t scale long term. My team and I had to innovate on behalf of our employees and do it quickly.

Research

Facilitated a workshop with VM’s & Product to understand the journey

I facilitated a workshop with product and the Visual Merchandising (VM) team to understand what curation actually looked like from end-to-end. I needed to understand everything they did in their day-to-day.

Key takeaways

  • It was such a tedious process for VM’s to do their job. They were being asked to carry out a creative process in clunky non-visual way using tool like:Excel queries & Pivot Tables, Internal Image Viewer, and Powerpoint

  • Category Managers would tell VM's what items to place in showroom, but there wasn’t an easy way to find products in the Amazon Eco-system

  • VM’s were spending most of their time pulling reports to match brands, categories, and colors

Driving Strategy & Alginment

Mapping UX solutions back to the business goals

I used the workshop findings to shape the product strategy with product and roadmap for the next year. I used a journey map to visually show the development plan to and new tool impact to share with leaders and stakeholders.

Ideate & Organize

I started sketching options of how I could organize the features in the tool in an intuitive way that would accommodate the phased development approach.

Prototype & Usability Testing

I setup sessions with VM’s to have them use the prototype and validate my early designs before being handed off to engineering to implement.

Key Learnings

  • Tags shown on products help VM’s make curation decisions faster

  • Price range is an important input to curation since sizes have variable pricing

  • VM’s have so many filters that they forget what is turned on and off

  • They want to see results they have added be able to change their mind and remove easily

Journey Map to understand the full process

Before focusing on improvements to the handheld tools, my product manager and I facilitated a workshop with all teams involved in Changeover. We needed to get the complete picture of all the teams involved and their tasks, tools, and challenges across the phases. This helped us figure out the biggest gaps in tooling and informed what to start building.

Delivery Handoff

I handed off my prototypes and implementation specifications for engineering to build.

  • Merch Curation Tool - New web based tool to support digital curation and scheduling for Corporate VM team

  • ASIN Swap - New handheld tool used in-store to move and swap items around the showroom by In-store VM

  • Changeover - Leveraged platform tool to help store employees know how where to place products in showroom

Amazon closed the Style concept in October of 2023 to focus on other initiatives.

Tools being used in action

The Merch Curation Tool launched to our corporate VM team with a 90% reduction in store curation.

The ASIN swap tool launched to in-store VM’s simplifying their workflow with tooling to easily be able to move product from the back.

Key Takeaways

Learnings

  • Tracking inventory moves throughout the store was something tech thought should happen, but it created challenges for execution in-store. Breaking that model and unifying the FOH/BOH bin structure could have simplified everything.

  • It’s hard to curate a physical store in a digital format. Being able to leverage AI for virtual try on could have greatly improved the product.

Challenges

  • “Building the plane” while flying is hard when it is a new concept. It was a challenge to react quickly in the software development process when the VM team and business had changing priorities.

  • Merchandising only one unit in the showroom proved to be a lot harder to maintain than expected. The store rarely looked how it was curated from corporate team.