Matalan, the trailblazing fashion and homeware omnichannel value retailer, is rewriting the rules of online shopping. Their secret weapon? Their GenAI tool – a groundbreaking innovation that promises to enhance product descriptions and create a seamless digital experience for customers.
Matalan has teamed up with Kin + Carta, a global digital transformation consultancy. Together, they’ve launched the new GenAI and Large Language Model (LLM) tool, which creates detailed product descriptions for items listed on its website. This marks the UK’s first foray into AI-powered product descriptions—a pivotal moment in Matalan’s digital journey.
The GenAI tool will be implemented across all departments, whether it’s clothing or homeware, Matalan aims to make online shopping a breeze. As well as making shopping online with Matalan even easier, it is expected to deliver a 4x increase in productivity.
The GenAI tool, developed and delivered by Kin + Carta and Matalan’s digital team in just three weeks using Google’s Vertex AI, uses product metadata and imagery to produce more detailed product descriptions for customers. Matalan’s bespoke model is configured to read product imagery and select details to inform the product description, providing customers with richer information about Matalan’s range.
Crucially, Matalan’s team of copywriters will continue to oversee descriptions, ensuring a crucial human touch whilst improving search engine optimisation, conversion rates and efficiency.
Enhancing production descriptions on Matalan.co.uk is the first of many initiatives the business has planned to improve its e-commerce offer, as part of its wider omnichannel strategy to make shopping online as easy, seamless and enjoyable for customers as shopping instore.
This is really interesting and we’re going to see more AI description generators – eBay already has one. And for those sites that don’t, retailers and brands will be using the likes of ChatGPT or similar services. The question that will be asked is will a GenAI Tool eliminate your job? Probably not is the answer, but it may change it. The days of manually creating product descriptions may be on the way out, but there will always be the need for a human to sense check the output and hopefully it’ll free up time for the more interesting parts of a copywriters job.
As the UK’s first retailer to be leveraging Generative AI in this way, this is a hugely exciting moment for Matalan. Not only does it demonstrate innovation into new and so far unexplored areas, but it shows our commitment to putting our customers and the shopping experience first – whether they’re shopping on our website or through the Matalan app. This all ladders up to ambitious business transformation, so it’s a proud moment to be announcing this industry-first, today.
– Ali Jones, Chief Customer and Omnichannel Officer, Matalan
This new tool is using generative AI to increase operational efficiency in Matalan’s in-house copywriting team and vastly multiply the number of detailed product descriptions Matalan can post onto its ecommerce site every day. This is the type of situation where generative AI is at its best, creating rich, bespoke content in a matter of moments that has a real impact on sales.
– Ewan Nicolson, Director of AI & Data, Kin + Carta
