Walmart keeps up with trends using generative AI

Walmart Trend-to-Product streamlines fashion design and production.

Walmart Inc. is introducing a new proprietary artificial intelligence solution created to help designers and merchants stay on trend.

Known as Trend-to-Product, the tool uses AI and generative AI to analyze and synthesize global data and trends, pulling information from the Internet and influencers to help its fashion team create affordable on-trend products in six to eight weeks from first identifying a trend.

Walmart intends to reduce the time involved in designing and producing a collection of clothing from ideation and concepting to the time items end up in stores and online. While this normally takes six months of human research, the retailer says Trend-to-Product uses AI to take the research and design phase from weeks to minutes and then leverages generative AI to create mood boards with collection names, colors, textures and ideas.

Designers and merchants then refine the mood boards, look at sell-through data and create the final pieces that will form the collection. In the final step, Trend-to-Product generates a fashion tech pack for the collection, which instructs suppliers on exactly how to make each item.

“Trend-to-Product empowers our private brand design and product development associates to spend less time chasing trends and more time doing what they love most – creating and delivering high quality, on-trend items for our customers for every season and occasion,” said Jen Jackson Brown, senior VP for apparel brand and design in Walmart U.S. “We are excited by the early results of this new technology and the power it could have to transform the way we operate and serve our customers.”