BOSS

BOSS (Hugo Boss) is releasing a new virtual store.

Developed by Emperia, using its Creator Tools platform, the immersive experience is aiming to encourage consumers to engage more deeply with the brand and discover, shop, and gift its range of 24/7 lifestyle products that include styles from the holiday collection alongside top gifting items in a gamified environment, with the aim of simplifying and infusing the process of finding the perfect gift with a bit of fun. 

Fully shoppable, the new BOSS Holiday Virtual Experience is centred around BOSS XP, the brand’s loyalty membership programme, while accessible to the general public.

The experience is set in a villa like setting with fully transparent walls, allowing visitors free movement, while exploring the various items, encouraging exploration and provoking curiosity; all leading to a holiday courtyard, accessible to loyalty members, called the Private Garden.

The Private Garden offers a glimpse into the benefits of becoming a BOSS XP member, including a raffle, event invitations, exclusive experience access, complimentary alterations and product sneak peeks, all animated and clickable, offering visitor education and reflecting the brand’s shopper appreciation.

Currys

Omnichannel technology retailer, Currys, has announced a range of upgrades to its UK&I stores.

It is switching from paper product pricing to digital labelling, known as ‘electronic shelf edge labelling’ (ESEL). This will arrive in 100 UK&I stores by the end of this financial year, with 60 going digital ‘pre-peak’.  

With clear labelling and easy to scan QR codes for further information, it seeks to make the in-store customer journey a lot smoother. ESEL will be managed by a centralised system which is also set to improve pricing accuracy and ultimately availability in stores for customers. 

The initiative has been driven by employee feedback that manual paper printing and labelling could become a real pain point for teams during busy trading periods.

Teams will now be freed up to spend more time helping customers. Currys has also introduced a digital queuing system across all its 298 UK&I stores. This new process will be fronted by dedicated ‘Sales Floor Leaders’ who will be on-hand to give customers a ‘warm welcome’ and be identifiable to customers with ‘Here to Help’ hi-vis. 

Integrated into colleagues’ ‘store-mode’ tablets that are used to process customer orders, shoppers can now join a digital line to speak to a tech expert.

M&S

Marks & Spencer (M&S) has renewed and increased the scope of its services contract with Diebold Nixdorf for an additional four years.

The agreement includes support services for the entire store estate, managed services for self-checkout technology and self-order terminals in the digital cafés, implementation services for M&S stores and distribution centres, and software services.

Diebold Nixdorf has provided hardware services to the UK retailer since 2019.

The scope of services expansion of the new contract, which applies to the more than 1,000 M&S stores in the UK and Ireland, aims to increase the productivity of both Diebold Nixdorf field service engineers and M&S colleagues – leading to higher availability of store IT and a reduction in calls placed to the helpdesk.

Flying Tiger Copenhagen

Flying Tiger Copenhagen is launching a new app with an accompanying Customer Club.

The latter is is a new initiative that’s part of its omnichannel strategy and it will be a key element in understanding customer preferences, delivering a better experience, rewarding loyalty and ensuring marketing efforts are more targeted and personalised.

The club was launched yesterday and customers that sign up to the app will be immediately rewarded with discounts ranging from 10% to 20% which can be applied to in-store purchases. 

Andre Filomeno, Senior Vice President for “Customer & Digital” at Flying Tiger Copenhagen, comments: “In 2023, we had around 100 million customers across our markets, and the majority of transactions happen in physical stores.”

“However, we are rolling out a number of initiatives to improve the experience, whether customers interact with us in the stores or digitally. Therefore, we are enhancing our customer experience across all platforms, making the new app a valuable addition to all of our channels and a key foundation of our omnichannel approach.”