Need to Know
05 : 12 : 17

London – Tom Ford has opened its first stand-alone beauty store, which offers products for male and female beauty consumers. The store is divided into six rooms, including a men’s grooming room, designed in grey glass, marble and mirrors to capture a minimalist aesthetic. The store combines features such as mirrors that store make-up tutorials and emails them to customers in chapters, as well as virtual lipstick trials and an interactive perfume counter. The experiential space also includes a ground floor area with augmented reality and a fragrance room offering a curated selection of scents.

As explored in our Beauty Temples microtrend, luxury brands are increasingly catering for beauty consumers as a way of expanding their offers and appealing to a new audience.

Los Angeles – Breve by Zenum is a smartphone that embraces the ephemerality of real-life interactions. Users can set content in the phone to self-destruct after a matter of seconds, minutes or hours. In line with an increasing interest in ephemeral forms of media, such as Snapchat and Instagram stories, brands are recognising that consumers are increasingly looking for media that expires, helping them to live in the moment and not have to carefully curate the content.

As consumers become increasingly bombarded by online content and attention spans wane, brands need to think of new ways to help people focus.

New Zealand – Cybersecurity firm Netsafe has created a chatbot designed to waste email scammers’ time. Anyone that has received a suspicious email can forward it on to the proxy email address, [email protected], which uses artificial intelligence to assume one of multiple personalities. By using humour and employing common grammatical errors, the chatbot aims to trick phishers into maintaining a conversation, which will help collect data on their vulnerabilities.

The email assistant has been designed to tackle New Zealand’s prolific problem with cybercrime. Some 70% of businesses that have been the subject of a cyber attack have fallen victim to an email scam, according to Netsafe, and in 2016 it cost the country nearly £130m (NZ$257m, $175.8m), according to reports from the Anti-Phishing Working Group.

In the wake of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, research by courier company CollectPlus suggests that many items bought in the sales over the holiday weekend will be returned. While the seasonal sale model has traditionally been part of the retail calendar, there are signs that this model needs to be updated, a topic that is explored in our Opinion piece with Claire Hobson, co-founder of Irregular Labs.