No dia 31 de outubro, o centro comercial assinala o Halloween com uma proposta que combina criatividade, animação e responsabilidade social, reforçando a oferta de experiências de lazer para diferentes públicos. Porque o Halloween não é apenas para crianças, o AlgarveShopping preparou um programa que convida também adolescentes e adultos a entrar no espírito da data. Para […]
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Shopping at Louis Vuitton can feel intimidating, especially for a first-time customer.
The French luxury house, founded in 1854, is known for its handbags, luggage, and signature LV monogram. Even though these pieces are widely recognizable — and worn by celebrities like Emma Stone and Zendaya — many come with price tags in the thousands. For a purchase that expensive, it can be helpful to know what to expect before you shop.
Business Insider spoke with three former Louis Vuitton employees about the most common mistakes they saw customers make. Here's what they said.
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Shelley Alvarado, a former sales associate and keyholder manager at a Louis Vuitton location in Topanga, California, said customers would often come into the store and ask if any items were on sale.
"I think that people assumed that there would be sales, and there wasn't a sales section at all. Louis Vuitton never went on sale," Alvarado told BI.
According to Louis Vuitton's website, that is still the case. The brand does not offer discounts on its products.
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Eddison Brown, a former Louis Vuitton client advisor in Los Angeles, said he would encounter customers who waited too long to purchase special collaborations and limited-edition drops, ultimately missing their chance.
"If you want something that's a limited drop, you have to be adamant about purchasing that right away because it'll be gone before you know," Brown told BI.
He also recommended building a relationship with a client advisor. These are employees who develop one-to-one relationships with customers, and can be a resource for information about upcoming products.
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Given the high price of luxury bags, it can be tempting to choose the less-expensive option. However, Dominique Danielle, a former Louis Vuitton employee in the Philadelphia area, said that sometimes meant customers ended up with a bag that didn't actually fit their needs.
"Customers would default to a less expensive option or bag without considering whether it actually fits their lifestyle," Danielle told BI.
Some customers, she said, later returned bags after realizing they couldn't fit everything they needed to inside. She recommended being open to an associate's advice rather than assuming a different size suggestion was an attempt to upsell them.
Moritz Scholz/Getty Images
A Louis Vuitton purse isn't necessarily supposed to look the same years after you buy it. For instance, Danielle explained that the untreated cowhide trim on bags like the Neverfull and Speedy naturally darkens with use.
"The idea of it is to get darker and show the wear and show just the journey of the bag," Danielle told BI.
Brown also said that aging can add character to a bag, especially when it's passed down through generations.
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The former employees all told BI that a high price tag doesn't mean customers should skip proper care and maintenance.
"Making this investment doesn't eliminate the need for care. It actually requires more of it because you have something that's precious and delicate and expensive," Danielle told BI.
Danielle emphasized the importance of storing these luxury items in their dust bags when not in use. Brown also recommended being mindful of exposing bags to rain or severe weather.
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All three former employees said customers sometimes seemed intimidated by the luxury environment or worried about how associates perceived them based on their appearance.
"I think that they assumed that the salespeople were judging them right when they walked into the store, which wasn't the case at all," Alvarado said.
To help shoppers feel more comfortable in the environment, Brown encouraged them to browse and ask associates any questions they had about any item.
The economy may be going to hell in a handcart, but at least John Healey has cut 6p from the daily supermarket bill. That will make all the difference to beleaguered households, says Alexander McKibbin.
The post The Chancellor’s 6p Per Day Supermarket Bill Saving Will Make All the Difference appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Dalet Labs
Would you shop from a feed of AI-generated images?
The startup Dalet Labs is betting you will.
The AI-commerce company exclusively told CMO Insider that it raised a $7 million pre-seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and is launching its first product, a shopping app called Scene.
Founded by Omer Bar-Tal in 2025 after he left the AI video startup Runway, Dalet Labs recently came out of stealth mode. The startup raised its pre-seed in late 2025, before finalizing its product road map. In addition to Lightspeed, venture capital firm SV Angel and individual angel investors participated in the round.
Lisa Han, the Lightspeed partner who led the round, said that Bar-Tal has a combination of "video AI research expertise" and a "deep understanding of what consumers want."
Scene, which became available on the Apple App Store in the US on Wednesday, lets people scroll through a feed of shoppable AI-generated images. The app will be invite-only at launch, and isn't yet available on Android. While the images of people or scenes are AI-generated, the products themselves come from real brands across categories like fashion, home decor, and sports.
Dalet Labs
Bar-Tal envisions Scene as a tool people can turn to when they want to buy something but are still uncertain about exactly what they have in mind. It's similar to scrolling through Pinterest or TikTok in hopes of being inspired to buy something, but Bar-Tal said there's a key difference: You come to Scene to shop, not be entertained.
Bar-Tal sees Scene as a virtual "mall" where users can window-shop, save items to their cart, and make purchases.
Commerce has become an increasingly attractive use case for AI tools like chatbots and agents (including Meta's Muse). However, Bar-Tal argues that AI shopping tools are missing something.
"AI is amazing when you know what you want, but it's really important to actually have an ability to discover and to see things," Bar-Tal said. Agentic commerce, he added, "misses the point in shopping — which is essentially a delightful experience."
As a Scene user scrolls and interacts with products linked in the app, the feed adapts to what type of brands or items the user is interested in. Then, Scene uses AI to generate scenes with people wearing or using those items.
Bar-Tal did not comment on which third-party models Dalet Labs uses.
Bar-Tal said Dalet Labs doesn't see its product as replacing influencers, but rather as "complementary."
"The content here is AI, but it is not aiming to replace creators because we are not aiming to create entertainment," he said.
However, even if Scene isn't competing with influencers for entertaining content, it's still competing with their business model: making money by promoting brands' products and ultimately driving sales.
Scene has a catalog of hundreds of brands and retailers, Bar-Tal said, and is making more partnerships. The company did not share further details on what brands Dalet Labs has already established relationships with.
Bar-Tal said the company is also leveraging affiliate marketing to monetize the app early on, working with affiliate networks to earn from each in-app transaction.
Dalet Labs' Scene is entering a crowded market of apps offering people ways to discover brands and goods, like TikTok's growing Shop presence in the US or Pinterest's visual search prowess. Startups like Doji and Alta have also raised millions on the promise of tech that lets people try on clothes using AI-generated versions of themselves.
How will Dalet Labs get people to download an entirely new app?
Using influencers and social media to promote the app will be a core part of Dalet Labs' user acquisition plan. It also plans to roll out a coupon campaign during the holidays, offering new users discounts on purchases made through the Scene app. Bar-Tal didn't share whether the discounts would be funded by Scene or by brand partners.
The New York-based startup, meanwhile, is using its pre-seed funding to hire more engineers and researchers to build out Scene.
Courtesy of Dalet Labs
Courtesy of Dalet Labs
Here's what the slide says:
For over half a century, every major shift in computing has been driven by an interface revolution.
The move from terminals to graphical user interfaces (GUIs) transformed computers from expert tools into mass-market products.
The rise of the web and mobile extended that pattern: each new medium made digital interaction more visual, intuitive, and consumable.
Text, by nature, demands active cognitive effort; Visual interfaces go a step further by allowing users to grasp high bandwidth information almost instantly with minimal cognitive effort.
Courtesy of Dalet Labs
Here's what the slide says:
Today, artificial intelligence represents the most profound computing shift since the PC. Yet, paradoxically, our interface to AI remains stuck in the terminal era.
We converse with models through text prompts and receive text streams in return in synchronous manner. Our product thesis is simple and inevitable: AI requires a native GUI.
We believe the GUI to AI will not be code-based, but rather generated by media models.
Courtesy of Dalet Labs
Here's what the slide says:
The core product of AI consumption platforms is inseparable from their textual chat interfaces.
For example, the OpenAI brand is strictly associated with the chat interface of ChatGPT.
Moreover, by decoupling the user interface from any specific model provider, we can integrate multiple frontier models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or open-source systems) and focus our innovation on the new media generation GUI platform. This modularity becomes increasingly valuable as AI models are commoditized. In addition, their technical stacks are anchored in the code generation paradigm, in contrast to our focus on Media Models.
Courtesy of Dalet Labs
Here's what the slide says:
Omer Bar-Tal
Research experience from Weizmann Institute.
A cadeia de relojoaria e joalharia BlueBird reabriu a sua loja no Centro Comercial AlgarveShopping, na Guia.
O conteúdo Loja icónica volta a ter portas abertas em grande centro comercial do Algarve aparece primeiro em Algarve Marafado.
Courtesy of Talon Krebs
Talon Krebs works full time as a TikTok Shop affiliate, promoting products on the app and earning a commission when shoppers buy through his links.
The gig earned the 23-year-old six figures last year, according to a 1099 form reviewed by Business Insider.
"As far as startup cost, TikTok Shop has to be one of the most profitable business models I've ever seen," he told BI.
Krebs said beginners can get started with a phone, a few products, and an understanding of what makes people stop scrolling. He shares three steps to turn TikTok videos into a source of income.
Anyone can open a TikTok account, but affiliates need an established following to join TikTok Shop.
TikTok offers multiple routes into its affiliate program, Krebs explained. Its pilot program requires 1,000 followers but limits participants to a handful of posts a week, while the main program, which gives affiliates more flexibility, requires at least 5,000 followers.
Krebs already had about 24,000 followers on a personal account when he got started. He said he built the audience by posting about sports, current events, and other subjects he liked: "I was just posting stuff I was interested in."
Krebs said he spent $100 to $200 on a handful of products when he first started. He chose items he needed anyway, like hoodies.
Affiliates can search TikTok's product marketplace for brands and products to promote. Krebs said they don't need a direct relationship with a brand to start making videos, though successful affiliates may eventually negotiate higher commissions or paid content deals.
Talon Krebs
For someone trying to keep costs close to zero, Krebs recommends looking around the house first. If an item you already own is listed on TikTok Shop, you can create a video about it rather than buying something new specifically to promote.
He also joined Media Labs, a community for affiliates that offered video feedback and weekly calls. He paid the $1,500 fee in six $250 monthly installments, putting his initial outlay — including products and his first community payment — at about $450.
Skip the community, use products you already own, and film with a phone and free editing tools, and Krebs said you could get started for essentially nothing.
A TikTok Shop video still has to work as a TikTok video. Krebs said the opening seconds matter most: The hook should get a viewer's attention, identify a pain point, or create enough curiosity to keep them watching.
In one of his most successful videos about a digital business card, he opens with: "Paper business cards are officially a thing of the past." The statement created some controversy, he said, but it got viewers' attention before he explained the product and how he used it as an entrepreneur.
Krebs tries to keep most videos between 30 and 50 seconds, though he said the right length depends on the product. Some products need more explanation, while others can be shown in a 10-second video.
He thinks of each video as a loop: The hook opens it, the middle explains or demonstrates the product, and the call to action closes it. Affiliates can tag a product directly in the video, allowing viewers to tap the orange shopping-cart icon, view the listing, and ultimately make a purchase.
Bloomberg/Getty Images
Instacart is carting away a technology it once said would play a key role in shopping.
The grocery delivery company will wind down the team that develops its Caper smart shopping carts, it said on Monday. The move, approved by Instacart's board of directors, will be completed by the second quarter of 2027.
A wind-down will cost the company between $55 million and $80 million, including the costs of terminating some employees and contracts, it said in a filing with the SEC. Instacart will reinvest savings from the decision into "strategic growth initiatives."
Caper carts were one of the most visible of Instacart's retail technology efforts. The company began as a delivery-focused startup in 2012, but diversified into selling technology to retailers over the last several years.
Equipped with cameras and sensors, Caper carts could weigh fruit, track what customers placed inside or removed from them, apply coupons, and accept payments when customers were done shopping. Instacart also saw an opportunity to serve users tailored ads on the carts' screens.
In early 2024, Instacart said it planned to roll out "thousands" of the Caper carts to stores. Then-CEO Fidji Simo said: "We really believe that it's going to be the future of grocery shopping."
Amazon, which makes a similar smart shopping cart, said at the start of 2026 that it planned to start using a new version at Whole Foods Market stores.
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No dia 31 de outubro, o Quinta Shopping convida famílias e visitantes a celebrar o Halloween com uma programação temática que decorrerá entre as 11h00 e as 13h00 e entre as 14h00 e as 19h00. Ao longo do dia, o Centro Comercial, na Quinta do Lago, transforma-se num ponto de encontro para momentos de criatividade, […]
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