Bodycare's Sheffield comeback store opens to queues, powered by PMC's AI-first technology

It’s a striking turnaround. Just over a year ago, all 147 of Bodycare’s stores had closed following its fall into administration, driven by rising rents and other pressures. A month after that, an investment group led by The Body Shop and Molton Brown’s former chief executive Charles Denton acquired the business, with a plan to relaunch it as an ‘AI-first’ retailer.

That plan needed an opening day that could actually hold up under pressure, and it’s here that PMC, as Bodycare’s technology partner, has been doing much of the work out of sight. The checkout environment, assisted, mobile and self-service, ran on PMC’s Graphene Engage Platform, while its Connect Integration Layer was pulling data from POS, network and in-store cameras into the AI platform in real time, rather than after the fact.

That same connected foundation is what makes the rest of the store’s AI-first ambitions possible. More than 30 cameras feed the platform with real-time insight, down to flagging when a shelf no longer matches its planogram, while a free-to-book content studio lets local creators film TikTok and other social content, streamed live to the street via digital displays.