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Hello reader,
The Tech in Asia team has just returned from our company offsite in Bali 🏖️. It was a great experience to connect with team members we’d only ever talked to on Google Meets or Slack, and we all had a fantastic time.
While we were there, I noticed that Indonesian beauty retailer Sociolla had a physical outlet in a nearby mall. I wasn’t able to check it out myself, but how the firm operates is pretty interesting, as Sociolla has developed some new solutions that could change up the way retailers manage their brick-and-mortar businesses.
Today we look at:
- Sociolla’s potential as a smart-retail player
- A customer engagement startup that’s bagged some bucks
- Other newsy highlights such as the launch of a new Web3 fund and Dana’s latest fundraise
Premium summary
When retail gets smart
Image credit: Timmy Loen
When Indonesian beauty retailer Sociolla first moved into the offline space, it faced many challenges. It had to manually update price tags across all its different stores and also didn’t have an integrated system between its outlets and online shop. As such, it took matters into its own hands.
- Do it yourself: Sociolla developed its own customized back-end tech, which enables it to use IoT-powered digital price tags, which can be updated across all offline stores in real time. This system also handles warehousing, finance, customer relationship management, and other integrations.
- All in one place: Sociolla’s system is fully integrated, giving the team a “single view of inventory across all channels.” It can determine the nearest location and best logistics partner for an online order, advise offline stores on what products to keep in stock, as well as automate purchase orders, payment requests, and approvals.
- The AWS of retail: Sociolla’s solution could open new opportunities for the firm, and its parent company Social Bella, to go into the enterprise software arena. If the firm can export its software to other companies, it could tap into the growing smart retail technology space and diversify its revenue, similar to what Amazon did with Amazon Web Services.
Read more: Can Sociolla become the AWS for smart retail?
Startup spotlight
Pretty clever
Image credit: Timmy Loen
Quick bytes
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