From Minutes to Moments: How Pandora Keeps Customers at the Center with KWI

The Background

A Global Brand Built on Human Connection

Pandora is more than the world’s largest jewelry brand—it’s a company built on helping people tell their stories through jewelry. With more than 6,700 points of sale in over 100 countries, including nearly 2,800 concept stores, Pandora empowers thousands of associates worldwide to create meaningful, personalized shopping experiences.

Inside each store, associates are not just salespeople. They are advisors, stylists, and storytellers, guiding customers to find pieces that mark birthdays, anniversaries, and milestones. In 2023 alone, Pandora sold 107 million pieces of jewelry—nearly three every second—proof of the high-touch, high-volume environment in which these associates work every day.

But at this scale, even small inefficiencies can ripple across the business.

The Challenge

When Minutes Steal Moments

Pandora’s concept stores are designed to be “the ultimate place for inspiration, guidance, and personal advice.” But for associates, delivering on that promise could sometimes be interrupted by something simple: product lookups.

When searching for a specific item, associates had to pause—flipping through reference books or scrolling through SKU lists to identify the right product. Each lookup took over a minute per item. In a busy store, those minutes mattered.

Caroline, a newer associate, felt the impact first-hand. She loved listening to the stories guests shared—like the mother buying a bracelet for her daughter heading to college, or the couple celebrating their anniversary. But she also knew that momentum was critical. Every time she stepped away to search for a SKU, the rhythm of the interaction was broken.

“It wasn’t that I couldn’t find the item,” Caroline explained. “I always could. But it took time. And in that time, I felt like I lost a little bit of the connection.”
For Pandora, the challenge wasn’t about inefficiency for its own sake. It was about presence: every extra minute spent searching was a minute less spent listening, suggesting, and celebrating with the customer. Guests who came in excited to share their story could suddenly feel the pause. A moment that should have felt personal could start to feel transactional.

The stakes were clear: when associates lost time to systems, customers lost a little bit of magic.

The Solution

Designing a Better Way to Serve Customers

Pandora wanted a solution that would enhance speed without sacrificing the human connection that defines its brand.

To solve this, Pandora partnered with KWI and Emmet Software—a Germany-based AI specialist—to launch AI Product Image Search, known internally as CharmFind, a new capability in KWI’s retail platform powered by Emmet’s advanced image-recognition technology.

The tool fit naturally into the flow of Pandora’s store experience. When looking for items too small to have barcodes, like charms, instead of paging through books or scrolling through endless SKUs, associates could simply snap a quick photo of a product. In seconds, the system identified the exact match—ready for checkout, no barcode required.

Pandora’s associates were amazed at how intuitive it was to use. “It didn’t feel like learning something new,” Caroline said. “It just worked the way I needed it to.”

Training takes less than five minutes—including Q&A—and each lookup is now about 30 seconds faster per item. For a brand where the typical basket includes two products, that means associates reclaim about a minute per sale—time that’s spent with the customer, not the catalog.

With KWI’s AI Product Image Search, Pandora’s associates can focus on what truly matters—listening, connecting, and helping customers find pieces that tell their stories—while technology quietly takes care of the rest.