ExperienceMINT, a Rocky Hill, Connecticut startup, launched ELEVATE in July 2026 to solve a problem that has plagued physical retail for decades. A customer enters a store searching for a specific moisturizer, faced with forty options sitting on the shelf with no salesperson nearby. They spend four minutes reading labels, become overwhelmed, grab a familiar brand name, and leave with something that might not solve their actual skin problem. Online, that same customer would have had filters, recommendations, and chat support available instantly, while in stores they had only a shelf and guesswork to rely on.
ELEVATE combines four layers of technology into one in-store platform, including interactive product displays, virtual visualization tools, AI voice assistants, and real-time customer analytics. The voice assistant component directly addresses the shelf dilemma, allowing shoppers to ask questions aloud about ingredients, product comparisons, and what customers with similar needs have chosen, with the system responding without forcing them to wait for a staff member juggling several other conversations at once. The magic mirror visualization tool lets customers see how cosmetics, hair color, or paint would actually look applied before committing to a purchase, replicating the online zoom feature and high-resolution photography that matter enormously in sensory categories where the gap between a swatch and its actual application can be significant.
The analytics piece is potentially most valuable to retailers, since physical stores have historically operated blind to customer behavior. They know what sold, but rarely know which product a customer examined for forty seconds before rejecting, which display layout drove engagement, or which shelf position confused shoppers. Online retailers have owned this kind of behavioral data for two decades, and ELEVATE is building the infrastructure to generate equivalent insights inside a brick-and-mortar environment, potentially closing a longstanding data gap between physical and digital retail channels.
CEO Andrew Pierce frames the company’s mission around the inherent sensory advantage physical retail holds over online shopping, explaining that the goal is to create a reason for consumers to want to visit a retail store in the first place, a motivation that usually has something to do with the senses, whether that means wanting to touch, smell, taste, feel, or see a product directly. What ELEVATE attempts is adding the informational personalization that online retail perfected to the sensory layer that stores uniquely offer, with the underlying premise that if the approach works, the in-store experience could become better than either channel alone rather than simply competing with online retail on its own terms.
Deloitte’s 2026 Global Retail Outlook found that approximately two-thirds of 330 retail executives surveyed worldwide expect to deploy AI for personalization within the next twelve months, reflecting broad industry momentum toward exactly the kind of technology ELEVATE is building. Pierce projects ExperienceMINT’s annual revenue will more than double to 50 million dollars, a growth projection suggesting strong retailer confidence in the technology’s value as physical retailers increasingly look to AI-driven personalization as a competitive response to the continued dominance of e-commerce platforms.
Follow the SPIN IDG WhatsApp Channel for updates across the Smart Pakistan Insights Network covering all of Pakistan’s technology ecosystem.
