The Scoop With Swap’s Juan Pellerano: What Is an Agentic Storefront?

Reported by Vogue.

The storefront as we know it — static grid, add-to-cart, pray it fits — may be on its way out. At the Vogue Business Global Summit held at the Château de Chantilly, Swap Commerce CEO Sam Atkinson announced the launch of what the company is calling the world's first agentic storefront, a move that signals something bigger than a UX upgrade. According to Vogue, Swap has been quietly developing the technology for over a year and is rolling it out with more than 20 brand partners, including Simkhai, Studio Nicholson, Retrofit, and Manors Golf.

So What Actually Is an Agentic Storefront?

Swap CMO Juan Pellerano puts it plainly: imagine if a brand handed its entire site over to ChatGPT for a day. Once you land on the AI-powered storefront, you get two modes — a discovery feed that mimics scrolling TikTok or Instagram, and a conversational interface where you can speak or type directly to an AI agent the way you'd talk to a knowledgeable salesperson. "If you're looking for an outfit for a trip, or just simple basics," Pellerano explains, the agent meets you where you are. The result isn't just a smoother browse — brands are reportedly converting at roughly twice the rate of a standard e-commerce site, with virtual try-on driving an estimated 20% reduction in returns.

The concept grew out of a product Swap never actually launched — a consumer-facing tool called Window Shop. As the team developed it, they realized AI was moving in a direction that made a brand-controlled experience far more urgent. The problem with letting LLMs like ChatGPT or Gemini handle shopping? Those platforms own the customer interaction, the data, and ultimately the relationship. Swap's pitch is giving that acquisition power back to the brands themselves — keeping the customer on the brand's turf, not inside a walled-garden ecosystem built by a tech giant.

Swap itself is only three years old, having started on the operational side — returns management, inventory, tax compliance — and scaling to support over 800 brands globally in a post-Brexit landscape where cross-border commerce got considerably messier. The agentic storefront marks a deliberate pivot to the front end, with a long-term vision of uniting the back-office infrastructure with the customer-facing experience into one seamless system.

Pellerano is measured about where all of this lands in fashion's bigger picture. He sees two distinct camps at the summit: early adopters leaning in hard, and brands still cautious. He's also quick to contextualize the AI moment — noting that the industry has cycled through blockchain hype, then AR and VR — but argues this time is structurally different because AI isn't contained to one vertical. It's already embedded in how people work, communicate, and yes, shop. The storefront of the future isn't just smarter; it's conversational, responsive, and built to convert.

The brands that figure out how to own that conversation — rather than rent access to it from a platform — will be the ones that own the customer.

Read the original at Vogue.