After empowering a Coca-Cola souvenir store in Shanghai, SandStar collaborated with the soft drinks giant to launch the Coca-Cola Smart Lounge, designed to deliver a digital, immersive and interactive shopping experience.

The lounge collects data from consumers’ shopping behaviour throughout their journey in each section of store. It is a recreational space where shoppers can enjoy beverages, coffee and interactive entertainment in different sectors.

With computer vision technology and a combination of AI and retail, North Carolina-based SandStar provides a customised offering for Coca-Cola to increase operation efficiency and improve operational management, and offer an upgraded shopping experience.

Deploying a matrix of AI cameras within each location helps upgrade the space to a smart lounge. This matrix system can accurately identify each shopper’s feature such as complete shopping behaviour, shopping routes, time spent in lounge, space distribution of areas visited, and interactions.

All features start to be analysed from the moment a shopper enters the lounge, through the entire shopping journey, to the moment the shopper leaves the store, and dynamically display the real-time analytical results on a tracking dashboard. The cameras collect information on people’s movements and merchandise only, and not privacy details such as facial features.

The tracking dashboard displays in real time the hourly, daily or recent number of shoppers, their average length of stay, in-store traffic distribution, and so on. Such information enables store operators to understand the shopper, and to generate data tags based on insights based on shopping behaviour and purchasing preferences of a shopper. As such, massive retail data can be converted into rich, actionable advice.

The number of orders and the rank of best-selling items displayed on the tracking dashboard enables store operators to understand merchandise. By analysing data on merchandise display, combination and promotion, store operators can keep optimising and iterating their sales strategy to discover more growth opportunities. As such, operators can make actionable decisions faster for smart merchandising, smart display, and smart supply and sales prediction.

The lounge project is not the first time SandStar has collaborated with Coca-Cola. In 2019, the launch of a Coca-Cola souvenir store in Shanghai became a classic case of the two parties working together to reshape retail with technology. SandStar used the AI technology to help Coca-Cola increase sales, empower operations, and reinforce its position in digital and smart retail. This collaboration can help both parties push their edges and create value together for the industry.

Founded in 2016, SandStar now has more than 220 engineers. Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, it is a qualified Intel IoT market ready partner and Microsoft Co-Sell partner, supported by venture capital investors after four rounds of funding, including CP Group, one of the world’s largest conglomerates.