Brunello Cucinelli Builds a Different Store for Every Shopper

Brunello Cucinelli replaced its traditional eCommerce site on Jan. 21 with a platform that builds a different shopping experience for each visitor rather than routing everyone through the same fixed pages and menus.

The system, called Callimacus, was developed by Solomei AI, the Italian luxury brand’s in-house AI research center. It interprets a shopper’s intent in real time to generate personalized content and pathways instead of relying on static navigation, the company said in a statement announcing its 2025 financial results. The platform is now live in Italy, the U.S. and the U.K., with additional markets planned in the coming months.

“For years we envisioned a new e-commerce platform, combining our desire to welcome our esteemed ‘online guests’ with the most promising technological innovations, and our own way of thinking,” founder Brunello Cucinelli said. “We firmly believe that artificial intelligence must remain profoundly human.”

Callimacus is the evolution of an earlier site, BrunelloCucinelli.ai, that the brand launched roughly a year before Callimacus replaced it. The new platform was built and implemented by makemepulse, a global creative technology and interactive production studio. According to makemepulse, the system follows a shopper’s browsing behavior and recognizes intent without collecting personal data.

Behind the interface, Callimacus works as a headless presentation layer, integrating with a retailer’s existing digital and eCommerce systems instead of replacing them, Pulse2 reported. AI agents handle the real-time work of reading visitor intent and assembling a personalized experience in place of fixed pages and predefined navigation.

Salesforce Is Betting the Model Can Scale Beyond One Luxury Brand

Callimacus is no longer just a Brunello Cucinelli project. Salesforce announced in late July it would invest in the platform to support its deployment for new clients across Europe and North America. The company is betting that AI-generated, page-free shopping experiences could reshape how other brands engage online shoppers, Digital Commerce 360 reported.

Solomei AI is patenting the technology behind Callimacus’ real-time experience generation. The Salesforce deal falls under Italy’s “golden power” regulation for technology assets considered strategically important, meaning it cannot close without authorization from the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, according to Pulse2.

Government approval is one hurdle. Whether a model built for a brand as small and specialized as Brunello Cucinelli can translate to mainstream retail is a separate, open question. Justin Baer, founder and CEO of menswear brand Collars & Co., told Digital Commerce 360 that most mainstream brands optimize their sites purely for conversion, prioritizing faster checkout and fewer steps, while luxury retailers use eCommerce differently. “For a brand like Cucinelli, eCommerce is not just a sales channel,” Baer said.

Other retailers are already testing a version of the same bet at far larger scale. Etsy has built buyer profiles covering more than 65 million shoppers to feed real-time personalization into search results and marketing outreach, PYMNTS reported. The strategy creates a compounding effect: The more a buyer engages, the more relevant each subsequent visit becomes.

Callimacus, though, applies that same logic to the storefront itself rather than just the recommendations layered on top of it, which may be the harder problem for a mainstream retailer to solve.

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