Nomagic, the Warsaw-based warehouse-robotics company applying Physical AI to fulfillment, said on June 11, 2026 that its Shoebox Picker has been named Piece Picking Robotics Innovation of the Year by the SupplyTech Breakthrough Awards. The win, on top of a recent IFOY Awards 2026 finalist nod, lands as fashion logistics operators race to close a labor gap on one of the industry's most stubbornly unpickable SKU classes.
Why shoeboxes are hard
Shoeboxes make up roughly 20% of items handled in fashion e-commerce and a much higher share inside dedicated footwear fulfillment centers. The two-piece carton, where the lid sits loose on the base, has historically defeated traditional vacuum and mechanical grippers. Nomagic's solution pairs a specialized end-of-arm tool with the company's general Physical AI brain, allowing the same robot embodiment to handle a wide range of packaging variations without humanoid mechanics.
VLA paradigms and a 'Library of Chaos'
Chief Scientist Markus Wulfmeier, recently recruited from Google DeepMind, framed the win as validation of the company's Vision-Language-Action (VLA) approach. Nomagic's internal "Library of Chaos" dataset captures millions of real-world SKU interactions including edge cases that synthetic data tends to miss. The system can autonomously transition between picking, packing and sorting, dynamically adjusting grip across variable packaging.
The Zalando rollout
Nomagic and Zalando announced earlier this year that the European fashion giant is scaling Nomagic's technology across its fulfillment network, installing up to 50 AI-powered Nomagic robots including Shoebox Picker units. The pickers handle 98% of all shoebox SKUs at 450 shoeboxes per hour, two to three times faster than manual picking. The deployment puts Nomagic in direct competition with the wider fulfillment-automation buildout sweeping European and U.S. e-commerce. Brack.Alltron also expanded its production-line VLA deployment with Nomagic last month.
Race to fashion's last mile
The SupplyTech Breakthrough Awards drew thousands of nominations from more than 15 countries, with Nomagic edging competitors on the basis of demonstrated throughput plus full integration with fulfillment center workflows. Industry analysts see piece picking as the highest-value remaining automation slot in modern fulfillment, where labor inflation and same-day delivery pressure leave little room for manual exception handling.
Reporting based on coverage from GlobeNewswire and Nomagic.