Luxury Briefing: Inside Chalhoub Group’s data-led answer to luxury clienteling

Since then, the tool has become a quiet success story inside Chalhoub’s broader effort to modernize how luxury shopping works in the Middle East. Now the Group is ready to share its early results. 

“The future is conversational commerce,” Jeremy Denisty, director of AI at Chalhoub Group, told Glossy. “People were already using AI to search, and search drives sales. Beauty made the most sense to start with, because so many of the questions customers ask — like, ‘Is this safe for a pregnant woman?’ — aren’t answered on product pages or Google.” Layla AI is currently available to users of the Faces app. The Chalhoub Group declined to share how many members use the app and to disclose the company’s annual revenue.

Faces operates as a multi-brand beauty retailer, offering over 20,000 products across skin care, fragrance, hair care and makeup. It runs 85 stores across nine countries, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan, alongside its growing e-commerce platforms. According to Chalhoub Group, Faces is the region’s leading beauty omni-retailer.

According to Denisty, early data suggests that Faces customers who interact with Layla spend 2.2 times longer on the app and are 2.6 times more likely to convert than those who don’t. “We really did not expect that [the conversion rate] would be that high,” he said.

Layla references a catalog of more than 20,000 products, offering shoppers tailored advice around ingredients, routines and skin needs. Users spend 7.4 minutes longer per session and explore 27% more products when interacting with the assistant.

Layla AI currently communicates in Arabic, Arabizi and English, with full fluency across multiple Arabic dialects spoken throughout the Gulf, including Saudi, Emirati, Kuwaiti and Levantine variations. The majority of users come from Saudi Arabia — around 80% of Layla’s conversations take place in Arabic, and 85% of Saudi customers have engaged with the tool.

“Faces is very large in Saudi Arabia,” Denisty said. “That’s one of the cornerstones of Layla’s success — its anchor in the region and its ability to speak Arabic fluently across dialects, combined with an understanding of what beauty concerns really look like in the Middle East.”

Along with sales boosts, the benefits of the tool include increased customer access to more brands. “Smaller and local brands that were previously harder to discover, because they are not prioritized on landing pages, are now being sold more often. That was not something we expected, and it’s a very positive collateral benefit.”

The tool’s reach remains small compared to the group’s overall customer base. So far, Layla has logged about 62,000 sessions, but the company expects that number to rise quickly. Layla is promoted across Faces’s website, app and stores.

“Once we reach 100,000 or even 1 million sessions, we’ll start using that intelligence to inform assortment, pricing and campaigns,” said Denisty. The logic is simple: every question customers ask reveals what they want, what’s missing and how their priorities are shifting. Over time, those conversations will shape everything from product assortment to pricing decisions and campaign planning, effectively turning Layla into a live focus group for the region’s beauty and luxury markets. “It’s still early days, but it will feed into our wider AI pipeline with customer analytics, marketing-mix modeling and warehouse capacity management. Once all these projects connect, that’s when the real value will emerge.”

Layla’s architecture was built internally by a 10-person team from Chalhoub’s innovation, data and product units. The system uses proprietary language models and first-party data, while focusing on privacy. “All of the prompts are encrypted. We never link them to purchases, and we have no way of knowing that ‘Zofia asked this and bought that,’” said Denisty. “It’s part of our corporate values to treat customer data with maximum respect.”

Chalhoub is now testing new Layla AI features, including skin diagnostics, virtual try-on and gamified routines, to better understand how AI-driven consultation affects average basket size and retention. “We’re constantly improving it,” said Denisty. “We’re already in the second version of Layla, and every week we make it smarter.”

The next stage will focus on omnichannel integration, where Layla can assist in-store consultants or continue digital conversations after purchase. “Our dream would be full integration where everything talks to one another, and you have one big brain about beauty that drives the business,” said Denisty.

Layla is part of Chalhoub’s Vision 2033 strategy, announced in 2023, which treats AI as a long-term investment in data-led decision-making, rather than a short-term experiment. Kering, meanwhile, launched its experimental Madeline chatbot in early 2023 before pausing it, and Dior’s Dior Insider assistant, launched in 2017, was an early experiment in luxury automation.

Layla’s purpose isn’t marketing, but instead testing whether AI can replicate service — the part of luxury that’s hardest to scale. “Conversational commerce is the future of commerce,” said Denisty. “Layla is validating our assumptions. Now we need to accelerate.”

The company’s AI division is tracking how engagement translates into discovery, loyalty and sales, with plans to expand the model into fashion next.

 “In fashion, the biggest pain point is returns,” said Denisty. “If we can help customers understand fit, style and sizing through conversation, we could reduce returns dramatically. That’s where we’ll focus next.”

Fashionphile launches in the U.K. with Luxe Collective acquisition, plans London flagship for 2026

Fashionphile, the U.S.-based resale leader for ultra-luxury accessories, has officially entered the U.K. and European markets through the acquisition of Luxe Collective, the once-viral British resale platform founded by brothers Ben and Joe Gallagher. The deal, announced Monday, marks the launch of Fashionphile U.K., initially operating as LuxeCollectiveFashion.com.

The expansion signals Fashionphile’s first international foray and includes plans to open a London flagship authentication center and store hybrid in 2026, joining existing locations in New York, Los Angeles and San Diego. These unique “back-of-house-first” spaces combine a warehouse, authentication center, photo studio, showroom and event venue.

Unlike most U.K. resale platforms, which rely on peer-to-peer selling or consignment, Fashionphile’s direct buyout model sees the company purchase inventory upfront and retain full control over merchandising. “There’s nobody doing our model in the U.K.,” said co-founder and CEO Ben Hemminger. “It’s a small difference, but one that’s clearly noticed by customers.”

The deal also revives the legacy of Luxe Collective, which shuttered earlier this year after a warehouse burglary wiped out £500,000 (approximately $625,000) of inventory. “We’ve had our own security challenges over the years in California and New York,” said Fashionphile founder and president Sarah Davis. “But we’ve developed systems people describe as ‘Fort Knox.’ That’s what London will see.”

In 2024 alone, £150 million (about $188 million) worth of luxury watches were reported missing globally, with £60 million ($75 million) linked to thefts in the U.K. Sixty percent of stolen watches were traced to activity outside of Britain, underlining the global nature of the illicit resale market. Among the most frequently targeted watches are Richard Mille models, favored by thieves for their sky-high resale value.

“We know the U.K. is a hotspot for luxury theft, especially watches,” said Hemminger. “Our multi-layered physical and digital security systems are designed not just to prevent loss, but to deter criminals altogether.” Handbags make up the majority of Fashionphile’s inventory and sales, but watches and fine jewelry are growth categories.

Fashionphile is on track to surpass $500 million in gross merchandise volume in 2025. With Luxe Collective’s social media firepower — including 1.6 million TikTok followers — and Fashionphile’s operational expertise, the company is positioning itself to lead the next era of global luxury resale.

“Sometimes the timing isn’t perfect,” said Davis. “But when the right opportunity knocks, you open the door.”

Revolve joins fashion’s AI-styling trend with ‘Build a Look’

In partnership with fashion technology company Zelig, Revolve has launched a “Build a Look” feature, allowing shoppers to mix and match items on digital models and build a virtual closet.

“We’re always looking for ways to innovate at the intersection of fashion and technology,” said Grace Hong, chief product officer at Revolve. “We’re incredibly data-driven, and we test everything before releasing it to our customers. The ‘Build a Look’ feature is something we’ve envisioned for years, but the technology simply hadn’t caught up until now. … It’s the ‘Clueless’ experience made real.”

Revolve isn’t alone. On October 6, Stitch Fix unveiled Stitch Fix Vision, a GenAI-powered style visualization tool that lets users see themselves in AI-generated outfits. And on September 9, Ralph Lauren launched Ask Ralph, a conversational AI stylist in its app offering visual outfit guidance using its own catalog.

And as for Revolve’s future AI developments. Hong said, “This is just the beginning. AI opens up an entirely new world for personalization, from building a smarter closet to tailoring recommendations based on each customer’s unique style and purchase history.”

Earnings

LVMH’s fashion and leather goods division brought in €27.6 billion ($29.8 billion) in the first nine months of 2025, down 6% organically. However, sales improved to a 2% decline in the third quarter, as local demand in the U.S. and Asia picked up.

Executive moves

• Maria Grazia Chiuri has been appointed chief creative officer of Fendi, marking her return to the brand after leaving Dior in May. Her first collection, debuting at Milan Fashion Week in February 2026, will span womenswear, menswear and couture, signaling a new era of unified creative direction for the house.
• Brett Johnson has appointed former Kering executive Marco Fiandesio as its first CEO to lead the brand’s next phase of growth.
• Lanvin Group CFO David Chan is stepping down on October 27 to pursue new professional opportunities as the company continues its turnaround efforts.

News to know

• The European Commission has fined luxury brands Gucci, Loewe, and Chloé a combined €157 million ($170 million) for anticompetitive resale price maintenance practices across the EEA. Gucci was fined €119.6 million ($129 million), Loewe €18 million ($19.4 million) and Chloé €19.6 million ($21.1 million). All three brands cooperated with the investigation and have since reinforced compliance measures.
• American designer Willy Chavarria has received a strategic minority investment of under $5 million from the Middle East luxury retail company Chalhoub Group, as the brand sets its sights on global expansion. The Group joins existing investor FAE Fashion Ventures.
• Diego Della Valle, chairman and CEO of the shoe brand Tod’s, publicly criticized Milan prosecutors’ handling of the Tod’s labor abuse probe on October 11. He defended his company’s ethics and called for reform of Italy’s supply chain laws, saying, “Audit us as thoroughly as possible, of course, but with judgment — not superficially, because you are touching on extremely delicate matters.”

Listen in

In this week’s episode of the Glossy Podcast, senior fashion reporter Danny Parisi and international reporter Zofia Zwieglinska discuss the surge in gold prices and what it means for jewelry brands, as well as the ongoing labor investigation into Tod’s. Later, they’re joined by editor-in-chief Jill Manoff to grade this season’s biggest creative director debuts, from Demna at Gucci to Jonathan Anderson at Dior, and decide which made the biggest splash across Fashion Month. Listen here.

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