Reliance Retail’s Fashion Vertical Looks To Leverage AI To Expand Footprint

Reliance Retail plans to leverage data analytics and artificial intelligence to stock store-specific assortment within the next year. Reliance Retail’s fashion and lifestyle business is reportedly investing heavily on technology to go hyperlocal soon.

Akhilesh Prasad, CEO, Reliance Retail (Reliance Trends) said that market has fragmented and the so-called metro market is no longer a big catchment area for retail fashion suppliers. “With the ability of data analytics and artificial intelligence, we should be able to stock store-specific assortment in a matter of six months to one year,” Prasad told ET.

The retail arm of RIL, which handles categories such as apparel, footwear and toys, is reportedly planning to dive deeper into cities and semi-urban locations. Prasad said that the company wants to capitalise on the depressed market to expand its footprint in the country and is targeting 70% growth in 2020.

The company is looking to maximize sales by deploying a technology team to develop applications for seamless online and offline experience. Prasad added that the retailer currently puts together about 50 relevant assortment combinations in its stores across the country and the plan is to create as many as thousand combinations for each of its stores by the end of 2020.

“One customer view and one product view features will be executed. Our online-only customer will be recognized at our outlet at his very first entry and will be served by the staff based on his online buying behaviour,” he said.

Reliance retail aims to adopt technology to enable the customer to buy online and even take a refund offline. The company is currently testing technology to implement this in the next 6-8 months.

Founded in 2006, Reliance Retail Limited is a subsidiary company of Reliance Industries Limited. In the food and grocery category, the company operates Reliance Fresh, Reliance Smart and Reliance Market stores. It also runs Reliance Digital, Reliance Digital Express Mini stores and Jio stores in consumer electronics and Reliance Trends, Reliance Footprint, Reliance Jewels, AJIO.com and others in fashion and lifestyle category.

In July 2019, Reliance Retail started the pilot phase of its new ecommerce initiative. The differentiated business model will provide a technology platform for millions of small merchants across India to strengthen and grow their business, the company had said.

The proposed platform is said to drive efficiency and value creation for all players in India’s retail market including producers, brand owners, supply chain players, merchants and customers. Reliance Retail was also reportedly planning to use over 5.1K Jio stores located across 5K cities and towns as delivery and collection points for its ecommerce venture.