Lush cleaning up at the till

Lush is powering in-store tills to instantly identify unpackaged products, drastically cutting checkout times and boosting efficiency.

Lush is known for its ever growing range of packaging-free cosmetics. These ‘naked’ products, like their bath bombs and shampoo bars, are great for the planet but create a unique challenge at the checkout: how do you scan an item that has no barcode?

Previously, staff had to memorise hundreds of products to manually enter them at the till. This led to slower transactions and long lines, especially during busy seasons. To solve this, Lush decided to bring the AI from its popular Lush Lens app feature—which lets customers scan products with their phones—directly to its in-store tills, all powered by Google Cloud.

Using Google Cloud Storage to host a library of over half a million product images and built with Gemini via Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform, to train its recognition model, Lush tills can now instantly identify any unpackaged product held up to the camera. What was once a manual lookup is now a split-second scan.

The results are transforming the store experience. According to Lush staff, during the Christmas peak in Glasgow queue times dramatically reduced from out-the-door to around just three minutes thanks to Lush Lens on the tills.