STARK Deutschland GmbH Success Story of a customer project
Builder’s merchant STARK Deutschland relies on an AI-supported image search tool to facilitate product search for end customers, crafts enterprises and its own employees. The AI-supported Visual Search solution combines inspiration with assortment, digitizes the consulting process and creates new added value in a more and more networked trading world.
Industry
Building materials trade
Company
Main location: Offenbach am Main
Locations: 260
Objective
Strengthening of customer retention and digitization of sales and distribution
Technology
Visual search
Challenges
- Many products are not visible at the point of sale
- Brand binds customers only poorly during inspiration phase
- Omnichannel channels do not intertwine optimally
- Digital sales and distribution is under high innovation and competitive pressure
- Data and processes are not yet integrated holistically
Solution and customer benefits
- Improved customer service and more professional communication
- Increase in service quality and workload reduction for employees in terms of routine tasks
- Systematic expansion and strengthening of omnichannel strategy
- Standing out from competitors by using smart technology
- Easy scaling of solution and expansion to further product categories
STARK Deutschland GmbH
STARK Deutschland GmbH headquartered in Offenbach am Main is part of the Danish STARK Group and among the leading builder’s merchants in Germany. Under the umbrella brand, STARK Deutschland unites well-known sales brands such as generalists like Raab Karcher and specialists like Keramundo (tiles), Muffenrohr (civil engineering) and Melle Gallhöfer (roof and facade). With its sales brands, STARK Deutschland offers a wide range of different building materials and services. The cross-trade product portfolio ranges from shell and building construction, dry construction, gardening and landscaping, construction equipment and tools, working clothes, tiles and floor coverings to civil engineering and road construction. STARK Deutschland GmbH also distributes different private labels at its locations throughout Germany.
Visual search and AI in the building materials trade: using a photograph to find the right tile
The purchase of tiles in the building materials trade is fundamentally simplified using the innovative visual search function: A simple photograph is sufficient for the intelligent AI-supported image search to find the right tile from over 9,000 products in the shop. A specifically trained BEIT model works in the background and locates product images in a multi-dimensional vector space – just like a card where every tile has its own place. Thanks to the cosine distance, it can be calculated exactly which products are most similar to the uploaded image. In this way, a complex decision-making process is significantly simplified due to intuitive image search, even if products are very similar or in case of white tiles.
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