An AI breakthrough in retail

Matalan, a UK-based omnichannel retailer, provides womenswear, menswear, homeware and furniture to customers worldwide. It operates more than 280 company-owned and franchise stores across the UK, Europe and the Middle East, and has a rapidly growing online channel.

With such a wide range of products, the company’s copywriting team was tasked with creating a large volume of product descriptions on a continual basis. Matalan wanted to explore whether generative AI technology could alleviate some of the workload, deliver better search results to its customers and ultimately lead to an uplift in revenue. 

In just three weeks, we built a generative AI and large ;anguage model (LLM) solution with Google Cloud Platform's Gemini and PaLM 2 on Vertex AI.

The bespoke tool is capable of creating product descriptions using product metadata for Matalan's full product range. Configured to read product imagery, it selects details from images to include in the descriptions. To ensure accuracy and quality control, the copywriting team oversees the automated descriptions.

The GenAI model is the first of its kind for the UK retail sector and has already provided several benefits to Matalan:

• It creates 100 descriptions in 30 minutes (versus 100 per day by the copywriting team).

• It generates rich, accurate product descriptions with minimal data input, leading to improved SEO and conversion rates.

• It increases copywriters’ efficiency, freeing them up for more strategic work.

• It enhances the customer experience with longer and more emotive product descriptions.