For luxury fashion, one of the biggest challenges brands face is replicating the offline experience online. While the assistance of dedicated staff, an immersive environment, and white-glove services all help to elevate the in-store experience, direct-to-consumer (DTC) sites can often feel automated or impersonal.
Agentic commerce leader Swap aims to change this. Through its agentic storefronts that mirror a brand’s existing own site, fashion players can offer shoppers an interactive format featuring personalized interactions with AI agents who can help them with everything from search and styling to virtual try-on and checkout.
At the recent Vogue Business Global Summit in Chantilly, Swap co-founder and CEO Sam Atkinson and CMO Juan Pellerano-Rendón co-hosted an executive roundtable breakfast with Vogue Business head of custom insights Anusha Couttigane, exploring the possibilities of this new technology.
Attended by senior leaders from brands including Longchamp, Sephora, Esteé Lauder Companies, and Ami Paris, the roundtable created an opportunity to discuss the difficulties brands face when designing an elevated e-commerce experience. One of the biggest being the silos that organizations operate within; while integrating AI tools is a priority for most teams, a frictionless integration is rare. Beyond the logistical hurdles of implementing new tools, however, the cultural attitudes of brands can create another barrier to adopting agentic AI — especially for those built around the personality of a designer, or at legacy labels with high levels of brand control to maintain prestige.
Atkinson, who is one of the chief architects of Swap’s suite of technology solutions, explained how there are creative ways to keep brand storytelling at the heart of an agentic experience. “A lot of the solutions that brands are playing with when it comes to LLMs [large language models] and agentic interfaces is that it still feels very prompt-based, very text-based. But we wanted to make it feel like you’re having a conversation with an expert whose sole purpose is to help you find what you want,” he said. “With our agents, you can talk to them, use your voice and have a conversation in the same way you would with someone in a store, and it feels much more interactive.”
The CEO also stressed the importance of maintaining brand identity while creating these solutions. “One of the experiences we’re creating is for Paul Smith: we’ve captured the voice of Paul Smith himself and turned him into an agent. So as a customer, you’ll be able to go online and talk with Paul Smith himself. He’ll be able to tell you about the designs, help you style and tell you about the brand and products in ways only Paul Smith would. This is just one of the ways we’re working on ensuring that brand identity is front and center,” Atkinson added.
Another key discussion point was how the nature of trust is changing, which Couttigane highlighted based on Vogue Business’s new How To Sell Now research, conducted in partnership with Swap. This is happening in the context of a maturing influencer marketing environment, with many of the consumers who participated in the research citing skepticism around claims made by influencers who are paid by brands to promote products. In contrast, AI LLMs and chat tools are increasingly viewed as trusted shopping partners, because results are tailored to the individual needs of the user and discovery is driven by the prompt (“search”) rather than paid search strategies.
However, CMO Pellerano-Rendón flagged that, as behavior shifts toward a higher use of chat tools and LLMs, brands risk losing control of the shopping journey. This is because the providers of these services want to keep users within the platforms and own the data. Swap aims to put the power back into the hands of brands, so that they own the acquisition power of shoppers by providing an integrated agentic experience directly within the brand environment.
During the Vogue Business Global Summit, while participating in the How To Sell Now panel, Atkinson echoed this challenge. “I think the most critical thing is that over 50% of the content that LLM platforms reference when they’re looking at what to surface is being pulled from editorial sources. So it’s not necessarily what a brand says about themselves, but it’s what is being said about the brand. Whether that’s a publisher or on social or the peer-to-peer community,” he said. “I think there’s going to be a gradual divergence where everyday essentials will be bought through an agent or ChatGPT. But for those products where you have a connection to the brand, you’re still going to want that brand experience. So the responsibility then falls on the brand to make sure you’re visible in these channels where people are starting to discover.”
For Atkinson, however, the ability to ultimately weave AI into directly controlled shopper touchpoints is essential for brands. “I think the brands that are doing well who we work with are those that are leaning into [AI], but also staying true to all the other stuff that they do great,” he said. “Obviously the brand and the connection with its customers — but then weaving AI into the customer touchpoints to give them a better experience.”
