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At a Home Depot parking lot, a man patrols on a bicycle for federal immigration agents, toting a megaphone on his hip so he can blast a warning to day laborers waiting to land a landscaping or construction job.The workers from Mexico, El Salvador and elsewhere carry whistles to also sound the alarm, while activists swap details over two-way radios about whether cars whizzing by could be unmarked vehicles carrying officers preparing for a raid.Their work is cut out for them. Agents have raided the lot outside the 108,000 square-foot Home Depot store in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles at least five times this summer, rounding up some immigrants and sending others running in search of safety.Home Depot stores in Southern California have long been an informal job-seeking hub for day laborers in the country both legally and illegally. Now the locations have become a prime target for immigration agents.In fact, Home Depot was reportedly mentioned as a target for immigration raids by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and chief architect of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, earlier this year.At least a dozen Home Depot stores have been targeted, some of them repeatedly, in Southern California since the administration stepped up its immigration crackdown this summer.Immigrant advocates sued over the raids but on Monday the Supreme Court cleared the way for federal agents to continue conducting sweeping immigration operations for now in Los Angeles, the latest victory for the Trump administration at the high court. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called it “a win” for the rule of law, while advocates swiftly criticized the ruling.“When you undermine the civil rights of those who are more vulnerable, you undermine the civil rights of everyone else,” Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said Monday during a press conference held near a Home Depot.Last month, outside a Home Depot in Monrovia, a man ran onto a nearby freeway to flee immigration authorities, and was struck and killed.The Van Nuys location has been hit particularly hard. Escaping three raids Javier, a 52-year-old Mexican immigrant who has lived in U.S. states spanning from California to Kansas over the past three decades, said he narrowly escaped three raids at the store, avoiding agents by hiding beneath a truck, peeling off in his car and dashing inside among the busy shoppers.“They come in big vans and they all go out to chase people,” he said in Spanish, asking that his last name not be used out of fear of government reprisal.The store sits on property near the Van Nuys Airport that is owned by Los Angeles World Airports, a department in a city whose policies limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said in a statement that her office supports the litigation against the sweeps and has trained city workers to prepare for immigration enforcement on city-owned properties.City councilperson Ysabel Jurado has voiced opposition to a plan for a new Home Depot in her district, contending the company hasn’t done enough to fight the raids.Chris Newman, legal director for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said “these locations should be protected by the city to the same degree the public libraries are.”The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment. Contractors make up about half its business Immigrant advocates say the country’s largest big-box home improvement retailer benefits from having an ample labor pool at the ready for contractors and should do more to protect customers, employees and day laborers.The Atlanta-based company, with nearly $160 billion in annual sales through Feb. 2, counts on contractors and professionals for about half its business and that’s a key draw for largely immigrant-day laborers. Its second-ranked competitor, Lowe’s, gets about 30% of its business from contractors, relying more heavily on homeowners and DIY enthusiasts, said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail.“So if you’re going for the volume, if you’re going where people are, and you can enforce things, you go to Home Depot,” Saunders said.The raids haven’t hurt overall sales, but the disruptions could affect specific stores by making some customers afraid to shop there, Saunders said.In the Los Angeles area, the company’s stores saw a 10.7% decline in foot traffic in June from a year ago and a 10% decline in July, according to Placer.ai, an analytics firm that tracks people’s movements based on cellphone usage. That’s a larger drop than the 3.8% and 2.7% declines reported at stores nationwide for the same months. Home Depot says it is not alerted to raids Home Depot has repeatedly denied being involved in immigration enforcement operations. The company’s late co-founder Bernie Marcus supported Trump, though a Home Depot political action committee has donated to both Democrats and Republicans.The company said it isn’t told if a raid is going to take place at any of its roughly 2,300 stores.“We tell associates to report any suspected immigration enforcement activity immediately and not engage with the activity for their safety,” said Beth Marlowe, a company spokesperson, adding that if employees feel uneasy after a raid, they can go home for the rest of the day with pay.In Van Nuys, witnesses said federal agents have arrested those in the lot before appearing to ask about their immigration status. Local managers have shut the store’s automated glass doors to keep agents out, they said.“They’re just fishing,” said Luis, a 37-year-old day laborer who is a legal resident and grew up in the United States after arriving from Mexico as a child. He declined to use his last name fearing government reprisal. ‘Home Depot is not an innocent bystander’ The trend of workers gathering outside Home Depot began with the rise of the home improvement retail store that allowed people, including contractors, to price shop and buy materials directly, said Nik Theodore, a professor of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois in Chicago.“The basis of competition began to shift and what distinguishes a contractor from getting the bid or not more and more has to do with labor costs,” Theodore said. “Home Depot is not an innocent bystander in all of this. Their sources of success were instrumental in catalyzing this change.”As the trend grew so did complaints about workers congregating in store parking lots, and in 2008 Los Angeles passed an ordinance requiring similar retailers opening up to adopt plans to provide relief, such as a seating area, bathrooms and trash facilities.In the parking lot in Van Nuys, a non-profit runs a labor center that takes workers’ names and tracks employers who fail to pay as promised. That’s one reason workers said they keep returning even after the repeated raids.Theother is community.Since the raids, Javier said he’s started considering returning to Mexico to wait out the Trump administration. In the meantime, he said he’ll keep coming to Van Nuys to find work.“It’s a place that becomes familiar,” he said. “Here, all of us together, we’ve become friends.” D’Innocenzio reported from New York. Associated Press writer Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report. Amy Taxin and Anne D’Innocenzio, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
In the early 2000s, fashion brands had a realization: They could throw their inventory up on a website and ask customers to sift through it to find what they were looking for. Two decades later, the fundamental structure of e-commerce hasn’t changed much. Shopping is a drag that involves endlessly scrolling for merchandise. [Image: Ralph Lauren] But change is in the air. AI is about to transform everything about online shopping. Consumers are already turning to chatbots to find and compare products, and to platforms like Daydream that are designed specifically for shopping for clothes. Now, we’re about to see how fashion labels themselves can use AI to make shopping on their sites less laborious and more delightful. Today, Ralph Lauren launches Ask Ralph, an AI stylist in the brand’s mobile app. The 58-year-old fashion brand has partnered with Microsoft to create an AI agent that mimics the experience of speaking with an stylist. You begin by expressing exactly what you’re looking for. Depending on the day, it might be specific like, “I’m looking for a black cardigan for the fall,” or open-ended like, “I’m moderating a panel at a big conference and I have no idea what to wear.” [Image: Ralph Lauren] Then, rather than sifting through rows of products, the app does the searching for you. It delivers fully styled looks from the current Ralph Lauren collection that you can shop immediately. And through the process, as you figure out what you’re looking for (say, cropped cardigans made of cashmere), the AI adapts to your preferences. “We’re trying to recreate the experience of working with a well-trained Ralph Lauren salesperson,” says David Lauren, chief branding and innovation officer at Ralph Lauren, and son of the founder. “We’ve taken all of our own best practices and built them into the AI.” [Image: Ralph Lauren] An Early Adopter This isn’t Ralph Lauren’s first partnership with Microsoft. Twenty-five years ago, David appeared on stage with Bill Gates to unveil Polo.com, the very first Ralph Lauren website. This was a time when few other fashion brands had any online presence at all. David has always been interested in adopting new technologies early. Shortly after the new website debuted, David partnered with NBC to build an online magazine full of videos and articles to blend content with commerce; in the following years, it would become common for brands to launch blogs on their website. And Ralph Lauren was among the first fashion brand to place QR codes in billboard and print ads to send consumers to its website. “We did this before most phones were able to read QR codes,” says David. “But people quickly caught up.” Ralph Lauren has been toying with the idea of a digital stylist for a long time. In the early 2000s, that early version of the e-commerce website had an “Ask Ralph” feature, where you could read content about how to put a Ralph Lauren look together, and even a video streaming service where you could talk to a salesperson in a showroom. “What we didn’t have at the time was AI,” David says. “We realized that AI could help us realize many of the concepts we had dreamt about back then.” To train the Ask Ralph model, Microsoft used data from Ralph Lauren’s archives and current collections to help identify the brand’s distinct aesthetic. Ralph Lauren’s creative team, from designers to in-store stylists, participated in the process to make sure that the app would create highly curated looks that reflect the brand’s take on styling. Then, members of the in-store team were asked to contribute insights about how they work with a customer to help them find pieces. Once they had created a beta version of the app, they asked employees to use it and offer feedback. The final version of the app uses conversational AI and natural language processing to understand open-ended prompts from the user. It also incorporates the customer’s shopping history, so that it can understand their preferences and pick pieces that match what they already have in their closet. The app can interpret context: It can identify whether the customer is trying to quickly buy a shirt to match an existing blazer, or whether they are just playing around to find new ideas for outfits. It also only shows pieces of clothing that are currently available for purchase, and over time, the app will adapt to the user. [Photo: Ralph Lauren] The Industry Shift While Ralph Lauren is an early adopter of AI technology, many fashion brands are building their own apps, says Shelley Bransten, corporate VP of global industry solutions at Microsoft. She says that the fashion industry is now shifting from “scroll-based” shopping, which involves looking through rows of thumbnails, to “goal-based” shopping, which deploys AI to surface results based on the customer’s specific needs at that moment. “The shopping experience is going to be more personalized, relevant, and more tied to the customer’s intent,” she says. Bransten says that many consumers have gotten so used to using AI agents like ChatGPT that they no longer remember how to use search boxes on websites. Instead, they type out full queries into search boxes, only to confuse the system. But companies that have made the leap to using AI on their e-commerce sites are already seeing more success. “They’re seeing higher conversion rates, units per transaction, and consumer happiness scores,” she says. [Photo: Ralph Lauren] At the same time, we should expect more general AI agents to improve. I recently wrote about Daydream, a shopping platform that allows you to describe what it is you’re looking for, then searches for pieces from hundreds of brands. It will tailor the results to your size, personal preferences, and budget. Soon, platforms like this are likely to replace searching for clothes on Google, but David believes that some customers will still want to search directly on brand websites. “We have loyal, long-term customers who trust us,” he says. “Ask Ralph is another way to deepen this relationship.” Ask Ralph is designed to make shopping less time-consuming for the customer, but David also believes it is an opportunity for Ralph Lauren to stand out by emphasizing the brand’s unique point of view. The app will curate looks that are very carefully aligned with the distinct Ralph Lauren aesthetic, and in doing so, will allow customers to enter the brand’s universe. “Our customers come to us because they like our point of view,” David says. “We can help them create the look that they want more directly.” The app could also be a way to bring new customers in. While it is designed to make the purchasing process easier, David hopes that it is also a useful free tool for anyone looking for help to get dressed in the morning. If you already have a blue blazer and turn to the Ask Ralph app for interesting ways to style it, the app will curate looks drawn from Ralph Lauren’s archives and style guide. “People still read fashion magazines and blogs to look for tips about how to dress,” David says. “I think of the Ask Ralph app as a kind of style book. It helps you figure out how to put a look together in the morning.”
Category:
E-Commerce
Weve had branded entertainment since Proctor and Gamble invented soap operas back in the 1930s. But as media fragmentation has gone into hyperdrive over the past two decades, brands have been forced to diversify the ways in which they gain and hold our attention. Its no longer viable or effective to overly depend on traditional paid media tools. Marketers can create content and experiences that attract and engage audiences rather than interrupt and annoy themand drive results. Some of the best examples of this is what we call brand entertainment. Brands of all stripes talk about it, but it is the exceptions that truly invest in making actual entertainment. Of course, theres box office hits like Barbie, The Lego Movie, and Super Mario Bros, but theres also classics like BMWs The Hire (2002), Red Bull “Stratos” from 2012, and the 2014 Patagonia doc DamNation. Dicks Sporting Goods has been funding and producing award-winning content for years. Over the past decade, the retailer has built an impressive catalog of five feature-length films and 10 short-form or episodic documentaries. Its 2014 doc We Could Be King premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, streamed on Netflix, and won the 2015 Sports Emmy Award for Outstanding Sports Documentary. It won its second Sports Emmy for a doc called The Turnaround last year. In August, it premiered its newest documentary, Big Dreams: The Little League World Series 2024, produced in partnership with Imagine Entertainment and MLB Studios. Soon after, it officially announced an in-house studio division called Cookie Jar & A Dream Studios, to formalize its commitment to entertainment as a pillar of its brand. On this months episode of Brand New World, Im talking to Dicks chief marketing officer Emily Silver about why now is the perfect time for an in-house studio, how they measure success on projects, and where it all goes from here. How the new in-house studio will impact how it invests in entertainment: First, you’ll see us take a more aggressive stance in the number of films and pieces of content we put out. Two, it helps us brand the studio so that we start to build more of a name for ourselves in the [entertainment] industry and attract different writers and different projects, which is already happening. And three, it gives us the opportunity to put a little more structure and framework around what content we want to produce and where we want to lean in to help build for the long term. It really just helps formalize the process in a way that we can be a little more choice-ful about what we want to do in the future. How the brand evaluates potential entertainment projects: For us, it’s really making sure that the story that we’re going to tell, or whoever we’re partnering with is going to tell, really fits with our values and our point of view on sports, which is the power to change lives and build community. It really has to click those two boxes, and we want to tell transformative stories that highlight grit and raw humanity and heartbreak in the lessons learned behind sports.Advice for marketers curious about entertainment: There’s a lot of money out there and you can see how this can go very wrong and very commercial very quickly. My advice would be to hold to your creative standards, and find people who think similarly to you about creative excellence. It really is about finding that match of people that you’d want to write with, and want to produce, and direct with. Making sure that your vision, and the mission of the company and the team align. Because there’s endless content out there. As we all know, the trick is getting people to care and to watch it.
Category:
E-Commerce
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