Dive Brief:
- Tapestry, the parent company of Kate Spade New York and Coach, has patented its AI-powered platform, Mira, the company said in a May 11 press release.
- Mira aggregates data from sources across the company and analyzes it to provide insights useful for making decisions, according to the press release.
- Mira is the 85-year-old company’s first AI patent and its second technology patent.
Dive Insight:
Before Tapestry’s data and analytics team created Mira, the company spent days combing through data from multiple dashboards to analyze its internal data. With Mira, that work now takes seconds to minutes, the company said.
“Our teams bring deep expertise, human judgment and creativity; Mira provides business intelligence to help our teams move with speed and agility,” Fabio Luzzi, chief data and analytics officer at Tapestry, said in a statement. “Together, that combination becomes a structural competitive advantage.”
Along with Tapestry, other major retailers have deployed AI to improve their internal operations, ranging from advertising and supplier relationships to customer service assistance and data analytics.
Walmart has built several AI agents, including Marty for its suppliers, advertisers and sellers; as well as another agent for its tech developers. Target relies on its AI-powered Target Trend Brain tool to brainstorm ideas for its merchandising team. Last month, Kohl’s said it has created an AI-powered analytics hub where workers can analyze product trends and discover factors driving results. Last fall, Levi Strauss & Co. announced its collaboration with Microsoft to develop an AI-powered “super-agent” that can operate across the company’s IT, human resources and operations functions.
Tapestry’s Mira announcement comes shortly after the company announced that its Q3 net sales jumped 25% year over year to $1.9 billion. Its net income ballooned almost 70% to $343.8 million. While Kate Spade’s sales dropped by 10% from the previous year, Coach’s sales surged over 31% to $1.7 billion.
