Cloudinary, the media experience cloud company that powers many of the world’s top brands, announced that leading UK retailer, River Island, has chosen its solutions to future-proof its digital media tech stack, boost the user experience, and shorten time-to-market. River Island joins hundreds of global apparel and fashion retail brands using Cloudinary’s Media Experience Cloud solutions to improve customer experience and engagement including Babolat, Bombas, Crocs, Dune London, Everlane, Guess, Jimmy Choo, Levi’s, Neiman Marcus, and Stylight. Both companies will be participating in the MACH Alliance’s MACH ONE conference next week in London, June 28-29.

“Today the online shopping experience has to be engaging and as visually realistic and detailed as possible”

With more than 60 years of fashion retail leadership, River Island is one of the UK’s best-known and beloved High Street brands. As resilient as it is popular, the retailer’s 2021 profits stood out for having rebounded strongly to pre-crisis levels. Critical to its success was the strong digital performance of its award-winning online store, which today accounts for half of overall sales. A key factor in delivering the best possible online customer experience is getting new products to market faster. River Island will use Cloudinary to support this by automating new media asset publishing across its multiple online channels.

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River Island will replace Adobe Scene7 with Cloudinary’s Media Experience Cloud platform and its Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution. The company expects Cloudinary’s automation to significantly reduce the amount of manual work needed to collaboratively manage media assets, including searching and sharing content. River Island also valued Cloudinary’s advanced capabilities, like the ability to enrich media assets with metadata and analysis and its AI-based content-aware detection model for fashion. The latter is an add-on that uses highly-trained AI models to automatically detect attributes of clothing in an image, including details such as the material it’s made of, type of fastenings used, and the presence of pockets.

“At River Island, the future of our brand is what excites us most and we aim to take our popular digital experience from strength-to-strength,” commented David Edwards, Head of Architecture at River Island. “Cloudinary’s microservices-based, API-first and headless architecture is a great fit for us as it integrates well with our existing CMS and tools like Adobe Creative Cloud. We’re really excited to apply Cloudinary’s advanced, AI-driven capabilities, which will speed up our capacity to bring new products online and elevate the customer experience.”

“Today the online shopping experience has to be engaging and as visually realistic and detailed as possible,” said Saranya Babu, CMO at Cloudinary. “Winning brands like River Island are eager to employ the latest technologies and future-proof their digital media tech stacks to deliver the kinds of experiences their customers have come to expect. We are delighted to welcome this popular UK retailer into the Cloudinary community and look forward to supporting their business needs through this next phase of their growth.”

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