Digital Transformation of WatchOps: Revolutionizing Luxury Watch Trading with ITTStar

Executive Summary

WatchOps LLC, a premium luxury watches rental and trading company that had years of paper catalogs that needed to be digitized. The company partnered with ITTStar to develop this solution using their machine learning capabilities to accelerate business growth and aid them in their digital transformation journey. Leveraging the industry leading capability of AWS, ITTStar enabled WatchOps to create valuable business impact.

Customer challenge

WatchOps’s business objective is to digitize the complete lifecycle of trading luxury timepieces. Traditional information for luxury watches is maintained in paper catalogs, and estimating the current value of the watch requires expertise only available with select people who have been working in this industry for years. To digitize the customer experience of trading these timepieces, WatchOps LLC. wanted to develop a database of premium watches, with more than 30 attributes that define make, model, features and other characteristics. This manual database creation would have had a requirement to hire an army of data entry operators and hence a digital solution was the need of the hour.

Once this visual database is built using technology, the digital experience would allow traders to upload an image of a watch, identify the make and model, and estimate the current market value. This would help eliminate fraud, scams and provide transparency to all parties to trade without any risks.

To attain this objective, WatchOps wanted to develop machine learning capability to enable identification of a watch, provide information to traders to authenticate, and establish a fair market value. Further, they wanted to define a rental price for these timepieces to provide interested consumers the option to rent these for a short period of time.

Partner Solution

ITTStar star approached this innovative project in four distinct phases:

• Phase 1: Discovery – Identified all sources and types of data available, including the quality, relevance and usability of such data.
• Phase 2: Analysis & Recommendation – Synthesized findings and recommended a technology enabled solution to transform books and brochures of luxury watches into a digital ready format.
• Phase 3: Defining methodology – ITTStar identified watch models and their characteristics and defined a unique model to develop a digital catalog for the customer.
• Phase 4: Implementation – ITTStar built this unique solution on AWS to extract images of the luxury watches from the catalog and corresponding details leveraging various services such as S3, Lambda, Rekognition and Textract. The input images were parsed for watches and corresponding description.

Why AWS?

Using AWS was a clear winner due to its continuous innovation in technologies like ML/AI, IoT, Data handling capabilities, its cost models and flexible offerings, aiding business to speed up the transformation journey. Amazon Rekognition & Textract was chosen to diverge images and text for easy tagging and to automate the ever-growing physical catalog that the customer had. Due to its ease-of-use functionality, it helped alleviate the integration experience, into our existing AWS solution with its API model.

Why WatchOps chose ITTStar?

WatchOps chose ITTStar as their trusted partner in their digital transformation journey. They wanted an expert partner to provide data driven innovation. ITTStar’s unique approach to solve complex data & analytics problems using cloud native data platforms and capability to drive innovations lured the customer to partner with them. Being an AWS Advanced Partner, their understanding of integration of AWS services in their solutions clubbed with their broken-down approach to solve the overall business challenge imbibed confidence. WatchOps, thus partnered with ITTStar to identify and implement a unique solution using various technological platforms to revolutionize search and discovery of their luxury timepieces using ML capabilities that ITTStar offered.

Impact & Result

ITTStar's unique solution transformed WatchOps’s business functioning in the following ways:

• 15x Faster Discovery: The new digital system accelerated the watch discovery process by 15 times compared to the manual process.
• Operational Efficiency: The automation of image tagging, and data processing led to a 40% reduction in operational turnaround time, including returns management, warehousing, and labeling.
• Accuracy and Fraud Prevention: Improved identification accuracy by 25%, reduced fraud incidents by 30%, and enhanced transparency in trading.
• Customer Satisfaction: Elevated brand experience led to a 20% increase in customer retention and satisfaction.