The retailer isn't afraid to jump from one idea to the next relatively quickly. "How about if we let

"The idea is to fail as fast as possible," says Hemal Kuntawala from M&S Digital Labs. He's working with a nimble, startup - style team embedded in Marks & Spencer, one of the UK's biggest retailers .
"We use lean startup techniques to validate the things we're working on really quickly," he tells the audience at WIRED Retail . The team at M&S Digital Labs is a mix of product design specialists, data scientists and marketers -- all coming up with ideas that will almost always fail but also give new insights.
Hemal explains that working in this way inside such a big company gives the team a lot of freedom. The team has looked at everything from how to recycle cotton clothing to the best ways to sell shirts online.
The retailer isn't afraid to jump from one idea to the next relatively quickly. "How about if we let customers create their own outfits? This works quite well online and we make it really easy to buy items," he explains. Another idea sees sales assistants connect with shoppers via an app to recommend new items and help with style decisions.
M&S sport outlet also experimented with customised online buying processes based on data and customer behaviour. So shirts are sold differently to sofas. Hemal says the record for implementing new deployments currently stands at 32 during one day.
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