Gerald Tan looks at how technology can help expand the brick-and-mortar experience by offering a deeply intuitive interaction for today’s savvy consumer
Gerald Tan looks at how technology can help expand the brick-and-mortar experience by offering a deeply intuitive interaction for today’s savvy consumer
Clockwise from top left: Backstage at Burberry’s latest collection, the second in its “see-now, buy-now” series. Lucky customers trying out VR technology at Topshop’s Oxford Street store. A screengrab showing Burberry’s February 2017 show through the special headsets. Gigi Hadid walks the runway at Tommy Hilfiger. The Adidas “Knit For You” pop-up at Bikini Berlin, a “conceptual” shopping mall. The workstations at the pop-up where customers can modify the sweaters to their liking.
When Joachim Hensch, Managing Director of HUGO BOSS Textiles, was in Berlin earlier this year, he chanced upon a pop-up store that melded technology, retail and services perfectly. The subject of his praise? Adidas’ “Knit For You” project, an ambitious undertaking by the German sportswear giant that offered customers the chance to design and purchase their very own sweaters in a matter of hours.
How Adidas achieved the feat was nothing short of genius: The customer first walks into a dark room within the pop-up, where camouflage-like pattern projections on the body can be adjusted according to their preference with simple hand gestures, thanks to sensors that pick up every movement in real time. A laser body scanner records the customer’s measurements to ensure a good fit. Once the colour combinations are finalised, the computer then feeds the information to industrial knitting machines that go to work producing the sweater inside the store. The finished piece is later washed and dried by hand. “You also receive a QR code on a card that contains all the documentation and information you need,” Hensch recalled as he spoke to fellow industry players at Fuze Fashion Technology 2017, Singapore’s first summit dedicated to the fashion technology landscape.“I’ve never seen anything put together so seamlessly before.” The long-lasting effects of technology on fashion have become especially pronounced in the last decade or so, with the advent of high-speed Internet breaking down the elusive world of luxury and increasing the speed at which fashion is consumed. Together with the rise of the smartphone (and the resultant proliferation of social media), the vast improvement in connectivity has given everyone from Shanghai to Seattle a ticket to a front row experience, which they would never have had otherwise.
As a result, fashion brands from luxury to high-street have responded over the years with the inclusion of live stream links for their runway shows or launched digital stores where customers can shop up a storm from the comforts of their own home. Led by Chief Creative and Chief Executive Officer Christopher Bailey, Burberry is a prime example of a major luxury fashion player that has successfully integrated the online realm into its business model.
Tommy Hilfiger is another that has embraced the clout of the millennial, with the American designer working alongside Gigi Hadid for his recent collections and setting records such as being the first fashion brand to launch “3D image recognition commerce on the runway” and a specialised application that allows customers to shop from photos of 3D moving images of its products.
More than ever, it’s important to shape the fashion experience around today’s digitally savvy consumer. And retailers can mobilise the wonders of technology to craft a streamlined offline shopping experience. Enter experts like Adrian Leu, who are heading companies that are developing cutting-edge strategies and using immersive technology to tell the story of a product in diff erent ways. Leu heads Inition, a 15-year-old multi-disciplinary production company operating out of London’s Shoreditch district that prides itself on “producing installation-based experiences that harness emerging technologies with creativerigour.” For Topshop Unique’s fall/winter 2014 runway presentation, the British high-street retail chain enlisted Leu and his crew to develop a special in-store installation that built on the hype surrounding London Fashion Week and provided an inkling to how a runway show can be integrated into a shopping excursion. The team devised special headsets that allowed their wearers to step into a 360-degree virtual world at the Tate Modern, where the show was being held. Besides remotely accessing the show live as if they were seated front row, customers who got to try on the goggles-like gear could also take a trip backstage, witness VIP arrivals, read live Tweets and other animation features.“It is how you marry the sexy and interesting bits the experience brings with the actual transactions the experience can provide,” Leu explained. “Utility is also very important. While a lot of these technologies off er fantastic entertainment values, they’ll have to also provide growth and utility moving forward.”
Already, cutting-edge interaction paradigms such as voice, gesture, gaze selection and haptics have been identified to help a brand blur its online and offline presence, as well as allow it to off er an experience that cannot be replicated by clicking on the Internet. The Financial Times has reported that some beauty brands are utilising counters with “motion-activated screens” that immediately provide customers with information about the products while browsing. Charlotte Tilbury has introduced a “magic mirror” that allows customers to see themselves with different makeup looks on, thus simplifying the decision-making process for the customer.
With the augmentation of reality no longer the stuff of sci-fi movies, it’s a world of possibilities out there. Depending on where our imagination takes us, there will be more to come. Think: Advertising panels within shopping malls that receive signals from your mobile phone and change their screens as you walk past; customised holograms on shelf displays that demonstrate the versatility of an item by automatically matching it to clothes you already own; fitting rooms with exciting and interactive features that make trying on clothes a joy instead of a chore. It is this seamless fusion of intuitive technology and the emotional quotient of browsing in a physical store that will not only revolutionise the look, feel and display in the future, but also help bring magic to brick-and-mortar retail. You just have to pop on your goggles to find it.
