Alibaba-owned Tmall ties up with Shanghai Fashion Week

Tmall, the business-to-consumer (B2C) shopping site owned by China’s Alibaba, has signed an agreement with Shanghai Fashion Week to help drive attendee and consumer insights.

This year’s autumn-winter edition of Shanghai Fashion Week, which ended on April 3, featured a number of Alibaba’s smart technologies. Facial recognition was used for admission to events and ‘showroom robots’ allowed select buyers watching via their mobile phones to view products, speak to designers and place orders in real time, according to an Alibaba press release.

There was also a foot-traffic heat map that helped analyze which brands or item racks garnered the most attention and how long visitors stayed in certain spots.

Fashion aficionados who did not get a chance to attend runway shows watched some of the brand showcases in an immersive, 360-degree ‘see now, buy now’ format on Tmall.

Tmall sees the tie-up as part of a wider push to support these upstarts, following its February collaboration with New York Fashion Week: Men’s, where four Chinese brands debuted their new collections during ‘Tmall China Day’.