AI for retail and e-com, by builders.
Moonlabs is the operator-led AI Academy in Derby. We run three live companies — Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk — and we teach twelve students per cohort to ship a real AI product, sell it to a real customer, and raise on it. Three pillars: Coding, Commercials, Investment. Twelve weeks. £6,000.
Moonlabs is what we are. Two operators — James Freestone and Louis O’Connell-Bristow — who run Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk. home.co.uk is a transactional consumer product with a catalog, search, content engine and customer-service stack — the patterns on this page are the ones we ship and tune ourselves every week.
The Academy is what we do. A twelve-week, in-person, twelve-student cohort in Derby. You build a real AI product. You sign a paid pilot on it. You write a deck and a financial model. You leave with a deployed system, a paying customer reference and a live investor pipeline. Coding, Commercials, Investment — the three pillars taught in equal weight every week.
Why this page exists. Retail and e-commerce are being rebuilt around AI faster than almost any other commercial function — merchandising, content production, personalisation, search relevance, inventory forecasting, returns triage, customer-service automation. Every one has a vendor pitch and an AI-native challenger landing in the inbox this quarter. The operators being promoted are the ones who can build the tools rather than evaluate the demos. You leave the Academy as the retail operator who ships the AI — or as the founder of a vertical-AI product targeting your own corner of retail.
Coding · the retail-AI stack, built
Agentic merchandising over your catalog, content personalisation that does not look generic, retrieval over your help-centre, inventory anomaly detection, returns triage, AI-native search relevance. Evals tied to revenue, returns rate, support deflection and CSAT — not just model accuracy — from week one. A deployed retail-AI tool by week twelve.
Commercials · selling AI into a retailer or DTC brand
Pricing tied to revenue lift, returns reduction or support deflection. CFO sign-off, the digital sponsor, the buying team. A one-page pilot on one category or one store. A paid pilot by week six — for many graduates, sold back to the retailer they came from and out into the local DTC ecosystem.
Investment · raising on retail-AI
Klaviyo IPO’d at $9bn, Bloomreach valued at $2.2bn, Ada $1.2bn, Algolia $2.25bn, Tally.ai funded, Shopify Magic shipping, Daydream raised $50m on agentic retail search, Faire AI — retail-AI is one of the densest funded categories of the cycle. Cap table, ten-slide deck, financial model. A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
I have never coded. Is this realistic for a retail professional?
Yes. AI tooling has collapsed the on-ramp; we have taken senior non-coding professionals through to a deployed product in twelve weeks. More on that here.
Will I learn how to evaluate vendor retail-AI products too?
Yes. After twelve weeks of building you can read a Bloomreach, Algolia, Ada or Klaviyo AI demo with operator-grade scepticism. The procurement conversations change shape afterwards.
Can my employer fund this?
Often yes — retail L&D budgets and the Apprenticeship Levy can apply. Larger retailers and DTC brands almost all pay the Levy. Full funding routes here.
I run a small Shopify / DTC brand. Is this for me as a founder?
Yes — arguably one of our strongest fits. A working AI stack pays back its tuition cost inside a year for a DTC operator who can build their own tools rather than rent six SaaS subscriptions.
How does this compare to the AI course for marketers?
Same Academy, different default project shape. Marketers gravitate to brand and content tooling; retail and e-com lean into merchandising, inventory and customer-service tooling. Marketer page.
More Academy entry points.
The Academy is one course with many doors. Each of these pages is a different entry point into the same twelve weeks.
Build it. Sell it. Raise on it. In twelve weeks.
Tell us what your retail or e-com function looks like and what AI tool you would build for it. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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