Nomagic, a Warsaw and Atlanta-based Physical AI company, has won a 2026 IFOY Award in the Robot Warehouse System category for its Shoebox Picker, a robotic system designed to automate one of fashion e-commerce’s most persistent manual bottlenecks: picking two-piece shoeboxes at scale.
The IFOY Awards, short for International Intralogistics and Forklift Truck of the Year, are among the logistics sector’s most closely watched honors, with winners selected through a multi-stage process that includes live testing, scientific review and evaluation by an independent international jury. Nomagic’s win follows an earlier finalist nod in the same category and comes weeks after the Shoebox Picker also took a SupplyTech Breakthrough Award for piece-picking robotics innovation, giving the product back-to-back industry recognition heading into the back half of 2026.
Shoeboxes have long resisted automation because they are fragile, inconsistently sized, frequently unsealed and often arrive unoriented in mixed bins, conditions that defeat the vacuum and mechanical grippers used in most warehouse robotics. Shoeboxes make up roughly 20% of items in fashion e-commerce orders, a share that climbs significantly higher in fulfillment centers handling footwear exclusively, leaving warehouses reliant on manual labor for a meaningful slice of order volume even as other picking tasks have been automated. Industry assessments have generally treated the two-piece shoebox as among the least tractable items in piece-picking automation, incompatible with the grippers that handle most other apparel and general merchandise.
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Nomagic’s system pairs AI-driven visual perception with purpose-built gripping hardware to pick, pack and sort shoeboxes directly in live warehouse environments, including mixed-bin scenarios, without requiring items to be pre-sorted or pre-oriented. The company says the Shoebox Picker can automate up to 98% of shoebox SKUs and is already running in a live customer deployment, a threshold that distinguishes it from earlier pilot-stage robotics aimed at the same problem.
“Winning an IFOY Award is an important validation of what we’ve believed for a long time: the next major leap in warehouse automation will come from Physical AI solutions that can solve the messy, highly variable tasks that legacy automation still struggles with,” said Kacper Nowicki, CEO and co-founder of Nomagic. He said shoeboxes represent a meaningful share of fashion e-commerce volume but have historically required manual handling because they are delicate, inconsistent and often unsealed, and that the award reflects the progress the company’s team has made in changing that calculus for warehouse operators.
The recognition lands during a period of broader momentum for Nomagic as it builds out its commercial footprint in Physical AI for logistics. Earlier this year, the company closed a $10 million Series B extension, lifting total funding raised to more than $84 million. Nomagic has said the capital will support accelerated commercial operations in the United States and continued development of its Visual-Language-Action models for warehouse robotics, the same underlying technology platform behind the Shoebox Picker. The company has also expanded its leadership bench this year, hiring a chief scientist from Google DeepMind to lead development of foundational robotics models, and has deepened existing commercial partnerships, including an expanded deployment with Swiss retailer Brack.Alltron covering production use of its Vision-Language-Action systems.
Hussein Kanji, founding partner at early backer Hoxton Ventures, congratulated Nowicki and the Nomagic team on the honor.
For fashion and footwear retailers, the award adds third-party validation to a category of warehouse automation that has drawn increasing attention as e-commerce volumes grow and labor costs rise. Footwear’s two-piece box format has been treated as a structural limit on full warehouse automation, meaning systems capable of reliably automating that workflow could influence fulfillment infrastructure decisions across the sector, particularly for footwear-heavy operators evaluating where to invest in robotics versus continued manual picking. Nomagic has previously cited fashion retailer Zalando among customers piloting its broader robotics fleet across European fulfillment centers, underscoring the scale at which apparel and footwear logistics operators are testing AI-driven picking systems as order volumes and same-day delivery expectations continue to rise.