Back in April we noted the appearance of luxury fashion outlet Brunello Cucinelli’s venture into e-commercelenic philosopher
This was created from design principles that set out to ditch traditional website navigation in favor of AI-aggregated buyer experiences that are piched as being composed in real-time for each shopper.
Flash forward eight months from the January launch and the online gambit has been deemed a success for the Italian retailer and in the latest related development Salesforce is putting venture money into the platform and will support its deployment for new clients in Europe and North America.
The nuts and bolts of how the new e-commerce partnership plays out in practice remains to be seen, but it seems likely that Salesforce will boost growth of the operation’s engineering and AI research teams to speed up future product development.
It will also be on hand to scale commercial operations across Europe and North America to third parties, bringing international clout to what has been a small team effort so far. Francesco Bottigliero, CEO of Callimacus and Chief of Humanistic Technology at the Brunello Cucinelli, notes:
It’s a small, young, talented team, but we also needed someone besides us who could guide us through the development of this project.”
As noted in the past on diginomica, high-end retailers have not exactly been at the forefront of the Amazon-led e-commerce revolution, although the pandemic forced a rather brutal re-think on the part of many once visiting ludicrously expensive physical stores in big cities fell out of bounds, but demand for life’s little luxuries did not.
Even a technophile retailer like Brunello Cucinelli has only dipped its corporate toes in the online pond to date, with direct e-commerce business only accounting for around seven percent of total revenues. So the opportunity for growth here is, in theory, pretty significant.
Since going public with the platform earlier this year, Brunello Cucinelli has had over 40 inbound enquiries from other retailers, not all of them in the fashion space.
Why is Salesforce investing?
On the face of it, the Salesforce investment is a surprise move, but perhaps less so when you consider that the firm is a long-standing customer, with founder and Creative Director Bruno Cucinelli himself being a regular guest speaker at the firm’s Dreamforce user conference, sessions that are always entertaining to say the least.
Apart from that, Callimacus is an AI-powered platform, ha been built for the advent of the headless era, a big theme of Salesforce’s own product direction in recent months. Operating as a headless presentation layer, the platform is intended to enable a breed of page-less websites and applications with AI agents orchestrating understanding of visitor intent in order to create that personalized shopping experience cited above.
This re-imagined website approach is already delivering “significant value”, says Luca Lisandroni, CEO of Brunello Cucinelli:
The new functionalities have made a strong contribution, delivering an experience that is increasingly effective, engaging and aesthetically refined for our visitors. All key performance indicators have been positive. The number of visits continues to increase. The average time spent on the site has nearly doubled. The number of orders has increased and the average order value has increased as well with our digital customers’ purchasing behavior becoming increasingly similar to that of customers that are shopping in our physical boutiques.
Reaction
As for Cucinelli himself, he enthuses of the work to date:
Callimacus really has been a disruptively positive change, how your approach to our product has changed and the image has changed. It has been a game changer. You see they are #1 in the world, market sales for the website…the [traditional;] website has been conceived a very similar way for the last few decades. This is a serious endeavor and enjoying daily relations with Salesforce, as we’ve had this since 2015, this has given us the opportunity to learn a lot.
Cucinelli, who is also Chairman of Solomei AI, the tech provider to the Callimacus platform, argues that the re-think in approach opens up “extraordinary possibilities for technology in the years to come”. He explains:
Three years ago, [Salesforce CEO] Marc Benioff and I began an endeavor with mathematicians, philosophers, humanists and technologists, from which Callimacus was born. Our idea was to create a simple, intuitive product capable of speaking the language of human beings; a sort of new web, without pages, categories or pre-determined paths, able to accompany the intent of each individual navigator.
I look with great confidence and hope for the path that Callimacus will pursue with Salesforce’s investment. There are numerous applications that Callimacus may have across many sectors worldwide and it is an honor for me to invite our clients to discover the freedom to learn, to choose and to act within our digital lives.”
For his part, Benioff, a Brunello Cucinelli customer himself, is quoted as stating:
Brunello has always believed that technology should elevate humanity, and that conviction is at the heart of Callimacus. The team has developed an innovative platform that reimagines AI-powered experiences, bringing together conversational AI, enterprise context, and real-time personalization to create entirely new ways for businesses to engage with their customers.
The Salesforce investment transaction falls within the scope of the Italian Golden Power regulation which means it must be submitted to the Presidency of the Council of Ministers for authorization to proceed. Separately Salesforce recently announced it will be investing $1 billion in Italy over the next five years. The firm already employs 600 people in the country, under Vanessa Fortarezza, SVP & Country General Manager, Salesforce Italy, and has opened a new offie in Milan’s Palazzo Missori, a Grade A development in the heart of Milan’s Central Business District,.
The US firm also intends to launch the Enterprise Architecture Academy which will initially involve more than 70 participants drawn from partners, customers, and Salesforce Solution Engineers, tasked with getting and passing on the skills needed to build an architectural foundation to drive digital transformation across Italy.
