Today’s fashion brands are inundated with options. New technologies and AI-powered tools are giving them more data to work with and more options for connecting with their customers. So much so that figuring out the best way to make use of the data available has become a real challenge.
For two brands, Van Cleef & Arpels and The Wires, the most important areas of focus are product discovery and personalizing the retail experience.
“The biggest changes in the retail experience in the last few years are that product discovery isn’t happening in one place, and the consumer journey is no longer linear,” said Kimberley Carney, founder and CEO of The Wires, a group of product discovery and marketplace platforms like FashWire for fashion and GlossWire for beauty. “For brands, that makes capturing attention much more challenging because you have a very short window to make an impression. But AI is making that much more powerful because discovery can become really personal.”
Carney — along with Steve Tsai, CEO of Kabob; Howard Witherspoon, CEO of Enlightened; and Crystal Bouzalis, avp at Van Cleef & Arpels — was speaking on a panel moderated by Danny Parisi, senior fashion reporter at Glossy, at Perfect Corp’s 2026 Global Beauty and Fashion Tech Forum on Monday. The panel explored how technology is affecting the customer journey, particularly at a time of great technological change. A Shopify report from this summer found that half of people in the country and two-thirds of luxury customers are now using AI for inspiration and product discovery.
As a result, every customer, luxury or not, is expecting a high level of personalization at every stage, according to Bouzalis.
“When you hear about a brand from a friend, then you see it on social, you research the brand yourself, you go into the store, you talk to a sales advisor, … Those all need to be the same journey, all one relationship,” Bouzalis said. “The consumer expects you to recognize them at each stage, understand who they are and not make them start over with every interaction.”
Bouzalis gave an example of how Van Cleef & Arpels is implementing technology to bolster personalization: appointment preparation. The brand has in-house tech tools built by parent company Richemont that keep track of high-value clients, collect all the historical data on transactions they’ve made and present it to the sales advisor so they’re adequately prepared when the client comes into a Van Cleef & Arpels shop. Over 75% of Van Cleef & Arpels’ sales are direct-to-client.
“Now, the client advisor can understand all of the client’s interests and history instead of needing to spend 20 minutes reconstructing their relationship.”
But Bouzalis also said luxury brands need to be careful about not acting on every piece of data they have about a customer, lest they risk overwhelming them.
“Luxury brands really have to have discipline and restraint with data,” she said. “And luxury is about restraint anyway. So if technology is telling you more and more about your clients and their preferences and their interests, and you get five good data points about your customer, you shouldn’t be sending five additional messages to those clients. You should use those five data points to send one message that’s more relevant and personal to them.”
Carney said the future of personalization in fashion retail will have to involve both physical and digital channels. FashWire works with brands like Badgley Mischka and Good American, but only sells them online. Carney said that will soon change; she’s planning to open the first FashWire store soon.
“We haven’t opened the physical yet, but we will be bringing [physical and digital retail] together, because I do think everything is going back to the store,” she said. “At the same time, we want the immersive experience to be between both of them, and I think it’s going to be really interesting to watch what happens when we take digital and put it into that physical environment.”
