The Iconic’s CTO talks frictionless retail and the art of earning trust

In retail, the loudest innovations rarely deliver the most durable change. Adam Cox knows this. As chief technology officer of The Iconic, his work is not grounded in spectacle; it is about tightening systems, reducing friction, and ensuring growth compounds smoothly. Progress is measured by refinements, including faster delivery windows, more accurate search results, and loyalty programs that feel purposeful rather than overtly promotional. “2025 was genuinely a game-changing year for The Iconic,” Cox told Inside Retail. “When it comes to our customers, the shifts resonating the most are those that reduce friction and reward loyalty.”

For Cox, the organising principle is customer lifestyle value (CLV). It is not a marketing metric but a behavioural one, and its purpose is to measure whether customers return, trust and engage over time. The metric, explained Cox, is directly related to customer trust and The Iconic’s ability to deliver not only a fast, seamless UX but also a reliable, consistent experience across touchpoints.

The long game of trust

That philosophy shaped The Iconic’s priorities last year. Rather than launch dramatic new features, Cox focused on infrastructure, delivery, search logic and loyalty architecture.

Delivery was the most visible change. The retailer reduced Melbourne free standard delivery times by more than 50 per cent, moving from four days to one to two days. In New Zealand metro areas, fulfilment improved from four to five days to next-day. The commercial impact is measurable. The Iconic observes a 3-10 per cent shift in conversion for each additional day of delivery time shown at checkout.

“Next-day and same-day delivery are no longer ‘nice to have’,” Cox said. Faster delivery directly influences customer choice and loyalty. But he is quick to stress that speed without predictability is incomplete. Since launching enhanced real-time returns tracking in October, return-related contacts have fallen six per cent week-on-week, an operational gain that doubles as trust reinforcement.

Search and discovery was a second structural lever. With more than 250,000 products on the platform, navigation becomes an economic function. Cox expanded The Iconic’s multi-modal search capability to repair weak queries and improve thin results. From September to November 2025, those refinements generated an 8.3 per cent increase in revenue.

The e-commerce retailer also identified approximately 17,000 under-performing search terms from a pool of around 500,000 and routed them to MMS. The result was a 28 per cent increase in click-through rate and a 12 per cent increase in conversion rate. The technology now powers Snap to Shop visual search and voice search functionality.

“The best uses of AI make customer experience feel more personal and more seamless, without them having to do any extra work,” Cox said. His framing is pragmatic, that AI is not an ambition in itself but a tool deployed against defined friction points. The product mindset remains consistent: the focus starts with a real customer problem, then rigorously tests and scales what demonstrably reduces friction.

The third pillar of 2025 was loyalty, but again, through Cox’s operational lens. The Iconic co-designed Front Row through its research forum “The Inner Circle”, drawing feedback from more than 50,000 customers. Within five weeks of launch in October, more than 540,000 members had actively engaged. In a survey of 10,000 members, 93 per cent rated the experience four or five out of five.

“A loyalty program isn’t just points, it’s an emotional connection at scale,” Cox says. Internal research suggests that around 40 per cent of customers will choose a retailer that rewards them when the same product is available elsewhere. Over time, he expects Front Row to drive higher frequency, lower churn and greater stickiness, supported by exclusive experiences this year, including access to the Australian Open for VIP members.

As scrutiny of dark-pattern UX and manipulative design intensifies, Cox frames governance as integral to performance. “Winning clicks is not the same as winning customers,” he said. Simplicity, transparency and accuracy are non-negotiables. Personalisation, in his view, must reduce effort and be “helpful, not manipulative.”

For Cox, last year was not a year of flashy transformation but a year of disciplined engineering, including shortening delivery windows, repairing search logic, codifying loyalty mechanics, and embedding transparency into design. The changes may appear incremental, but through his lens they compound. In modern retail, trust is now built into systems, perhaps built one at a time.

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