Simone Oloman, co-founder of the “Deliveroo for fashion” platform Need It For Tonight (NIFT), was motivated to create the service as a result of her frustration with the unreliability of conventional delivery services.
“ There were countless times where I’d paid for express delivery and it came three to five days later” Oloman explains. But one occasion in which her sister was let down on the day of an event was the tipping point. It made Oloman question: “Why is there no platform or app where you can see what different stores and brands are in your area and then crucially get it delivered quickly by bike?”
Harnessing her experience from a technology start-up, which focused on early stage conversational AI, Oloman had seen retailers turning to automation because they were inundated with customer queries and 95% of those were surrounding how flawed delivery is.
“Hearing these pain points from such a variety of different retailers just reinforced that this is a really big problem” she notes. “Not only for consumers, but for retailers who are now affected.”
Initially launched in London, NIFT works with boutique retailers and quality fashion brands to help consumers discover and then have fashion delivered at pace.
“We see ourselves as a digital extension of those brands and of those bricks-and-mortar stores” states Oloman.
“We are not just a logistics business. I count ourselves as a very innovative and sexy marketplace app. We tend to work really closely with the brands, we’re seeing that people are coming to us for brand discovery and curation as well.
“ I look at Deliveroo and all of the restaurants that you never would have heard of if it hadn’t been for Deliveroo. In the same way, we want to mirror that in the fashion space.”
NIFT is now expanding into Manchester, but the platform itself is growing beyond app functionality.
“ We’ve now got an embedded delivery checkout. If you’re on a retailer’s website, you don’t have to come to our app, you can check out with Need It For Tonight and get 90 minute delivery, same day, or next day. It sits as a plugin, which is either Need It For Today, Need It For Tonight, or Need It For Tomorrow.
“We’re now empowering lots of different retailers to be able to do this. Ultimately, that can stem from outside of fashion as well. It can go for any ecom business that wants to be able to offer this,” says Oloman.
Expansion of NIFT, both geographically and functionally, has been helped by a blending of physical and digital retail – or “figital”.
Oloman adds: “In the future, I don’t think online’s going to lead, and I don’t think offline’s going to lead. It’s very much going to be a combination of the two.
“Retailers, particularly bricks-and-mortars are going to have to step away from just traditional – be a lot more experiential to keep up.”
The platform currently offers personal stylist assistance, run by people for that personal touch. But Oloman is not against deploying AI for such an offering.
“ It’s great to be able to come onto a website and use a chat bot and get your answers immediately, but sometimes the customer does need that human touch. It’s really important that it’s easy for the customer to be able to get in touch with a human or you’re going to have frustration.
“I saw it time and time again when a customer just wanted to speak to somebody. It’s important to get that balance right. And that is going to be one of the bigger barriers with AI – the balance of AI efficiency with consumer trust,” she states.
Oloman’s presentation Creating The Deliveroo Of Fashion Through Efficient 90-Minute Delivery, Personal Styling And Tech Innovation will be held at 13:55 on 03 April, at the Retail Technology Show. Find out more here.
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