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If you’ve ever wanted to know how to style a Ralph Lauren Polo Bear sweater but didn’t have a Ralph Lauren-trained sales associate available to help you, you’re in luck.
Ralph Lauren on Tuesday announced the launch of “Ask Ralph,” a new AI-powered shopping experience that leverages generative AI’s conversational abilities to let customers ask questions and get product recommendations. What the brand believes makes its AI chatbot different from others to hit the market is that it leverages Ralph Lauren’s deep archive of content to offer inspiration and guidance on how to put pieces together into Ralph Lauren-approved outfits.
“What Ralph Lauren does is he creates a style, a way of living, a way to put clothes together, so it’s not that we make a pair of chinos or we make a blazer, it’s how we put it together that becomes that magic,” said David Lauren, Ralph Lauren’s chief branding and innovation officer.
Shoppers can ask questions like what to pair with a navy blazer, or how to style one of the brand’s Polo Bear sweaters, and get three curated looks they can click into to explore the individual items or refine further with additional text prompts. The AI experience will pull from Ralph Lauren’s live inventory, so the products it recommends will always be in stock to buy, according to the brand.
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“Ask Ralph” will first be available to US users of the brand’s app, where Ralph Lauren’s most engaged customers tend to shop, but the company plans to eventually roll it out more widely. At launch the experience will provide recommendations solely from Ralph Lauren’s Polo label, but over time it will expand to encompass other Ralph Lauren brands, including lines such as homeware.
Fashion businesses have seized on generative AI as a way to give online shoppers something more like the level of personal advice they would get from an in-store sales associate, versus the more basic suggestions for complementary items they see when browsing an online product listing. While the earliest generative-AI shopping assistants were clunky, companies have been working to refine their abilities and provide a better customer experience. The AI shopping platform Daydream built its entire user experience around the capabilities of the large language models underlying tools like ChatGPT. It’s still unclear how many shoppers want styling cues from AI, but what is evident is that more of them are turning to platforms like ChatGPT to discover and buy products.
For David Lauren, “Ask Ralph” marks a full-circle moment for the company his father built. The brand embraced e-commerce early on, and one of the first things it created was a feature called “Ask Ralph,” according to Lauren. At that time, it hired human writers to create editorials with insight on how the brand put looks together, something it called “merchant-tainment.” The dream was to one day automate a way to give shoppers the same level of guidance. The idea continued evolving until AI came along, Lauren said.
Teaching the AI how to put looks together in Ralph Lauren’s style involved blending a number of different data sources, from the imagery the brand created over the years to copy its writers have produced. The company also ran months of beta tests with both customers and employees.
“That was a really important way for us to get feedback from people that know the brand and know our product and know our styling the best,” Lauren said. “Not only did members of our design team participate, but we also had a lot of our in-store stylists participate in that, too.”
In time Ralph Lauren expects to begin integrating customer profile data as well, so that the AI can provide even more personalised advice based on a customer’s shopping history.
“What we accept at Ralph Lauren is that AI is totally new, and in the beginning, it’s going to function more like an employee who’s been in the store for just a few months,” Lauren said.
But Ralph Lauren believes the AI will improve quickly, and it wanted to be an early adopter, just like it was with e-commerce.
