Crave Retail

Crave Retail is an Austin, Texas-based retail technology company that sells an in-store experience and intelligence platform for physical retail. Its core product line began with smart fitting rooms — interactive digital screens in the fitting room paired with mobile tools for sales associates — and has expanded into a platform spanning the fitting room, the sales floor and the shopper's phone. The company positions the product as making visible the part of the shopping journey between store entry and checkout: what a shopper wanted, what they tried on, what could not be found, and why they left.

The platform is organized into two products on a shared data layer. Crave Engage is the shopper-facing product, delivering digital shopping assistance across fitting room screens, the sales floor and mobile. Crave Assist is the associate-facing store operations product, providing live floor visibility, smart service routing, item lookup and consolidated shopper requests on a single device. Beneath both sits an intelligence layer built on session-level RFID data captured inside fitting rooms, which the company ties to service execution and conversion metrics, and which it markets as supporting merchandising decisions and conversion improvement for brick-and-mortar operators.

Founding story

Co-founder and CEO Matthew Cyr began his career on the store floor, starting as a store manager with Abercrombie & Fitch in 2008 and helping open stores in New York, before joining Skechers, where he co-developed the Commit to Convert training program and worked with the company's co-founder on growth across China and Southeast Asia. Across operations, planning and merchandising roles he found that retailers were accountable for conversion without tools to understand what drove it; a subsequent move into ecommerce technology, where the full customer journey could be mapped and tested, prompted him to start Crave to give physical stores comparable visibility, beginning with the middle of the shopping journey. Co-founder and CTO Amir Behnam, a University of Waterloo engineer who previously built enterprise retail commerce systems at GroupBy, architected the platform from its first code.

Business model

Crave Retail sells software and connected in-store hardware touchpoints (fitting room screens and associate mobile applications) to retail chains, deploying and supporting installations worldwide through a dedicated deployment organization.

Traction

Public figures cited by the company include 3,000+ live touchpoints, 32M+ shopper sessions, presence in 10+ countries, 11+ languages and seven years in market, with named brand deployments at River Island, Foot Locker and Fabletics.

Latest developments

The platform has been extended beyond smart fitting rooms into Crave Engage and Crave Assist, with a Store Agent experience referenced among the products shaped by the product organization. Leadership additions include Chief Deployment Officer Ken Mazzrillo, previously at RetailNext and AiFi, and Chief Product Officer Daniel O'Sullivan, previously at nCino.