Brand Experience Lab

An expert at the shelf edge,
in every category that needs one.

ARIA is a conversational assistant for the aisles where choosing is hard — wine, hardware, health and wellness. Ask it the way you’d ask a person who works there. It answers like one, and it says so when the answer isn’t a product.

See ARIA in your category

Try it — switch categories. These are real ARIA flows.

ARIA

Shelf-edge assistant

Guided preview of a real ARIA flow

Most shoppers don’t need more choice. They need one answer.

High-assortment categories are where margin lives and where shoppers stall. Forty feet of wine. A wall of fasteners. A health aisle organized by manufacturer instead of by what’s wrong. In every one of them the shopper either defaults to the thing they already know, grabs the cheapest option, or leaves without buying.

The staffing math doesn’t work. Category expertise is expensive, part-time, and never standing where the decision happens. Shelf tags don’t hold a conversation, and nobody downloads an app in the aisle.

That gap is the whole opportunity.

Ask. Narrow. Extend.

  1. 01

    It asks what a person would ask

    Not a filter menu. What’s on the menu, how heavy is the mirror, beach day or every day. Then it uses the answer to eliminate rather than to list.

  2. 02

    It commits to one recommendation

    One bottle, one anchor, one brace — with the reason and the shelf location. Confidence is the product. A ranked list of twelve is the original problem in a new interface.

  3. 03

    It extends the basket

    The recommendation rarely ends at one item. A wine becomes the dinner. A deck stain becomes the stripper, the pads, and the drop cloth. This is where a category assistant becomes a store-wide one, and it’s the part most shelf-edge tech never reaches.

The model isn’t category knowledge. It’s structured guidance through a hard decision.

Wine

The original brief, from a national grocery retailer: sell more wine. Decision fatigue in its purest form — high assortment, low confidence, real price anxiety.

Hardware

The strongest attach-rate case we’ve built. Almost no project is one item, and the shopper usually doesn’t know what the other five are until they’re home without them.

Health & wellness

Front-of-store navigation — sun care, compression, bracing, travel. ARIA narrows to the right product and routes anything clinical to the pharmacist. It does not advise on medication.

And the pattern generalizes

Paint, garden, baby, pet, beauty, cellular. The requirement isn’t a category ARIA already knows — it’s a decision the shopper finds hard and a staff member who isn’t there.

It hands off.

Soft spots in a deck aren’t a stain problem — they’re rot, and staining over them makes it worse. An old knee injury isn’t a brace question until someone who knows the injury weighs in. In both cases ARIA stops recommending and points to a person.

This is a product decision, not a limitation. An assistant that always has an answer is one bad recommendation away from being switched off, and the categories with the most margin are the ones where a wrong answer costs the most trust.

Why retailers care

Attach rate, not just conversion

Every recommendation carries a natural next item, and ARIA already knows where it is.

Coverage where staffing isn’t

Specialty expertise is expensive and part-time. ARIA is in the aisle at 9pm on a Tuesday, which is when a lot of these decisions actually happen.

Language, not literacy

Shoppers ask in plain words. No category vocabulary, no learning curve, nothing to download.

Signal you can’t get from a shelf tag

What shoppers asked for, what they rejected, what they were trying to do. Intent, captured at the moment of decision.

Built, tested, and in the field.

ARIA began as a request from a national grocery retailer: help shoppers buy wine. The first working version was a functioning conversational assistant, not a concept deck — then extended across additional specialty categories and tested with people across a wide range of ages and comfort with technology.

It now runs as the AI layer of an in-store kiosk co-developed with that retailer. Conversations about scope and rollout are ongoing.

Questions we get

Does this have to be a kiosk?

No. ARIA is the conversational layer. Shelf-edge unit, endcap screen, handheld — the hardware follows the category and the footprint.

How does it know our assortment?

It’s built against your product data and your planogram, which is also how it can tell someone the aisle and shelf. The conversation quality is ARIA; the inventory truth is yours.

What does a pilot take?

The conversational layer is the fast part — the demo on this page was built and tested before any hardware existed. Assortment data and hardware determine the rest.

Tell us the aisle where you lose people.

We’ll show you what ARIA does with it — your assortment, your categories, your shopper.

See ARIA in your category