LONDON,UK — June 7, 2017. With the growing relevance of online transactions, retailers are exploring new ways in which they can overcome the challenges associated with selling nondigital products, such as clothing or eyewear, without customers having physical access to products. VR,AR and immersive fitting-room technologies can provide information about how a product fits a particular customer in a novel way and mitigate the stress that the existing information gap generates in the retailer’s supply chain.
Most of us, occasionally, do have to risk a stress headache, by going to the shops to find that elusive “something to wear” for a big occasion. If you are 5’7, size 8 and have regulation length arms, you’re going to be fine on the high street, but it does get more complicated if you are a bit short or a bit tall, particularly, if you are so called “plus-size” and shopping online.
One of the great drawbacks of shopping for clothes online is what size to choose. It’s why so many people order clothes in different sizes just to send some of them back. Metail, an UK-based company developing an immersive ‘try it on’ online shopping experience which enables consumers to create a bespoke 3D model of themselves, has done some research on the scale of returns:
Key findings from the research:
Tom Adeyoola, CEO and founder of Metail, said to BBC Radio: “We created society where we are presented with the projected ideal of size and shape you should be, so we are compelled towards that sort of vanity sizing, therefore wanting to be the size that we are aspired to rather than size we are.
And on the other side, in terms of the retail industry it’s hugely unsophisticated and in general – retail industry builds a sample what they determined think is an average and then everything off that is basically a straight line.
Which means as you get a variation in population if you are different from the average, the variation in size becomes increasingly further and further away from what you might be. So it becomes harder and harder problem to actually find stuff that works for you. ”
With an expanding team (including 10 PHDs) and over $20 million in funding, we see a future where the ‘MeModel’ is everyone’s trusted guide in online experiences involving your body.
“The direction we want to go in long term is that we want to eradicate the notion of size completely as being part of the decision making process in terms of when you buy clothes. Actually, buying clothing and finding stuff that will suit you should be about shape.
And if you can start to use the data that we are bring in to the clothing supply chain in terms of the size and shape of customers, this can help retailers rethink how they make clothes, to start making them in the right way and to match the customer demographic of
the customers they have ,” he said to BBC.
Source: Metail.com, Stanford.edu, BBC
