Adidas Partners With Findmine On AI Shopping Experience

Adidas is partnering with artificial intelligence (AI) platform provider Findmine to offer complete product recommendations on the retailer’s site.

Chain Store Age reported that through the use of AI, the German sportswear company can automatically generate complete recommended outfits as a customer browses the website looking for individual products.

Before the solution, Adidas merchants would have to manually put together outfits for its online “Complete the Look” feature — a process that took 27 steps and 20 minutes to finish, and resulted in fewer than 10 percent of products appearing in the feature. And since the customer average order value (AOV) significantly increased when they were shown a recommended outfit, Adidas wanted to find a way to make the process easier.

Enter Findmine, with an AI solution that was initially tested out during a six-week period that showed half the traffic to the Adidas site manually-programmed outfits, while the remaining half were offered outfits generated by Findmine. The pilot proved that both merchants and customers were unable to distinguish the difference between the AI-based outfits and the manually-created ensembles.

Since the tech was officially rolled out, Adidas has seen a 95 percent decrease in the time merchandisers spend on Complete the Look, while the number of items featured in the outfits has increased by 960 percent.

“Findmine has helped us reduce the amount of manual work and has helped us ensure that our newest products have cross-selling from day 1, improving conversion, average order value, and customer satisfaction better than any other solution we’ve tried,” said Bryan Klavitter, senior director, Adidas consumer experience.

Last year, Adidas announced that it was planning to close stores to focus more on its digital initiatives in order to more than double eCommerce sales in two years’ time.

“Our website is the most important store we have in the world,” Kasper Rorsted, chief executive of Adidas, said at the time. “It has priority when we hire, when we allocate our resources and when we build our infrastructure.”