Meagan Moakes
3 March 2019
What is Crave Retail?
Based in Austin, Texas, Crave Retail is a next-generation store experience platform that harmoniously connects shoppers, store teams, and inventory. Their cloud-based platform offers turn-key experiences throughout the store to increase customer engagement, boost associate productivity and increase sales. Most notably is their ready-to-go interactive fitting room experience. By creating a frictionless shopper journey from online to in-store purchase, we can acquire a 360 view of the customer and offer actionable insights to effectively delight the shopper and optimize store performance.
Upcoming Events
At the end of this month, Fossil Group is hosting RevTech’s 11th Tech Trends in Retail in which Robotics and Automation will be key players. Every week, I will be showcasing each presenter and how their technology is paving the way for new retail.
Creating experiences for the consumer in shopping has become a pivotal decision to stay above the fray of retail closures. Crave Retail is a great example of how these innovative decisions give the consumer a seamless shopping experience and have them choosing experience over the convenience of Amazon.
As the Founder and CEO, Matthew Cyr is incredibly passionate about the intersection between retail and technology and has over 15+ years in related experiences.
Interview With Matthew Cyr
Meagan Moakes: How did your experience working for Skechers shape your idea on the future of retail?
Matthew Cyr: Great question! I had a very fortunate opportunity to use my domestic retail experience and support Skecher’s South East Asia business with strategic planning to improve store operations and customer engagement. I was amazed by Skechers ability to market their product line so effectively on the global market. In many ways, Skechers success was because they were a “marketing shop” that sold great shoes. Working for Skechers helped me realize what is required of a company to be successful. Today and onward, shoppers demand individualized experiences often nulling the impact of marketing and products to win the loyalty of shoppers. To effectively serve traditional and modern shoppers, retailers must find the intersection of people and technology to be an “experience shop” that happens to sell products.
MM: Do you have any competitors and if so, how are you differentiating yourself from them?
MC: When most people think about our Interactive Fitting Room solution, they often think of Magic Mirrors. Such mirrors have only made it to a few flagship stores and often over complicate a simple expectation. Our fitting room software operates on an iPad within a sleek, secure, and retail-ready kiosk. By design, we address more prominent question retailers are asking which is how to get the right solution into every store. This is where Crave Retail begins to differentiate. Everything from economical options, easier integrations, and intuitive designs for user adoption are at the forefront of our company. We aren’t only enhancing the fitting room experience, we will serve a complete customer journey from clicks to bricks, and as a result, offer action-oriented data that retailers have never seen before. If we stick to our plan, we’ll make modernizing the retail experience more accessible and faster.
MM: Do you have any exciting partnerships currently or planned for the future?
MC: Yes, we are particularly excited about our partnership with Aila Technologies. They share our philosophy for seamless experiences, integrations and building for iOS implementations. We find Apple to be the leading choice by retailers and by following that path, we will allow them to launch Crave’s platform quickly. We are also talking to POS providers, inventory management systems, and digital management organizations. I believe that we should be making it easier for retailers
MM: What will Crave be working on in the next 6 months?
MC: The next 6 months will be focused on people, product, and partners. I want us to build the best product because we understand retail not just because we have great engineers. Hiring people who love the challenge of making retail experiences great is a top priority. From a product perspective, we are focused on innovative ways to bring customers to the store, in-store personalization experiences, and creating actionable insights that retailers can use across the organization. Lastly, I’ll personally be putting much effort into building more integrated relationships with best-in-class partners. Together, we will help retailers mitigate trying to wrangle multiple solutions together themselves. If you haven’t noticed already, my focus is always about making it easy for retailers to serve the modern shopper – after all, that is our company mission.
Early-Bird pricing ends this Thursday, March 7th. Grab your ticket here.