Replicating the premium feeling of flagship stores online remains one of luxury’s biggest pain points. Although brands have improved their omnichannel experiences since the pandemic, progress has been painfully slow. But with this year’s rapid advancements in multimodal search and generative text-to-video AI capabilities — including OpenAI’s release of Sora in December, Runway’s Gen-4 video generator release in March, and Google’s May release of the Veo 3 video generator — brands have more tools than ever before to create high-end immersive experiences.
Moncler is one of the first to experiment with these new AI tools. The Italian luxury brand is today (30 September) relaunching its website with over 200 new features, in a quest to transform it from a point of transaction and distribution, into a brand destination. Among the innovations, AI-generated videos are integrated into Moncler’s product pages, so that customers can explore a 360 view of products and see how the fabric moves with the body. The videos are created from still photographs of real models wearing Moncler’s collections, with the brand now shooting its e-commerce content at the same time as its brand campaigns, to keep the image quality consistent.
“A brand is more than a name — it’s an energy, a point of view,” Remo Ruffini, chair and CEO of Moncler, tells Vogue Business. “Products are more than objects, they are experiences. That is why we strive to express the brand attitude across every touchpoint — offline and online — leveraging the latest innovations to make people not only see, but deeply feel and connect with the world of Moncler.”
Moncler’s web redesign comes as marketing experts say brands must rethink their e-commerce sites to stay ahead of online shopping’s new AI era. Some 80 per cent of consumers now rely on AI-written results for at least 40 per cent of their searches, and the large language models (LLMs) that power ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode “crawl” the internet for content that matches up to shoppers’ natural language searches. Experts say “intent-based” product descriptions that give further detail about product use cases and features, image and video content that better resonates with multimodal image-based AI search, and up-to-date website infrastructure are now essential for brands that want to be picked up by AI search engines.
Meanwhile, as ChatGPT maker OpenAI announces an integrated checkout option and Google is expected to follow suit, brands are directly competing with these AI search platforms to host the entire buying journey. In order to build customer loyalty to a brand’s online store, immersive content is now the biggest weapon in a luxury brand’s digital arsenal. Moncler’s customers have been increasingly typing longer natural language queries into the website’s search bar, and the brand is planning on introducing conversational search and more personalised product recommendations using AI in 2026, as well as exploring new product fit visualisations as AI diffusion models rapidly improve.
It’s not the first time Moncler has experimented with AI: it released an AI-generated film this summer as part of an experimental creative campaign, in collaboration with creative agency R/GA. Moncler has continued this partnership with R/GA and Google to create the dynamic modules for its website, using Google’s Veo 3 text-to-video generator. Hugo Boss unveiled its first experiments with AI-generated video earlier this year; just eight months later, Moncler’s collaboration with Google Veo shows a leap forward in quality.
The redesigned Moncler.com product pages are crafted to feel more like a magazine — customers will navigate product descriptions from right to left, mimicking the turn of a page, rather than the traditional website’s downwards scroll. Moncler’s new site has also undergone a mobile-first rework — 80 per cent of its customers browse the site on their phones, as the split between desktop and mobile purchases (with the former historically being much higher for high-end brands) is becoming more even. An emphasis on negative white space around product images is designed to create a more “premium” feel, and the typography used for the brand’s flagship store signs now features in the redesigned online brand logo across the top banner of the site.
Much like Ralph Lauren’s recent AI tool, Moncler is seizing the cross-selling opportunity gained from showing customers head-to-toe “featured looks”. The new website integrates the brand’s campaign imagery within its product pages — alla The Row — so that customers can also view the product they’re browsing as it features within Moncler’s editorial campaigns. More technical products like Moncler’s Grenoble ski collection come with advice on how the product can be layered, and explain the technical features and appropriate use cases for each item.
Since Moncler began beta testing the new site in July, it’s seen average engagement time increase 49 per cent among mobile visitors, pages viewed per session rise by 22 per cent, and the bounce rate decrease by 6 per cent on mobile. The brand will continue releasing interactive modules in the coming months.
“From our heritage to the most advanced technologies, with this evolution of Moncler.com, we continue to bring our creativity and product stories to life with even greater clarity, emotion and depth,” says Ruffini.
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