Trying on Clothes, 2.0

Shoppers at the Japanese department store Mitsukoshi find an electronic concierge awaiting them when they arrive at the dressing room with clothes and shoes in hand. As they walk in, an RFID reader detects the tags affixed to the products; seconds later, a wall-mounted touchscreen serves up product information and offers alternate sizes and compatible accessories. If the shopper has picked up the wrong size or an unfortunate color, he can press a few buttons to summon a store associate with the correct item in hand.

The "Intelligent Fitting Room" system, designed and installed by Cisco, has been in place at Mitsukoshi since 2006, and in that time apparel department sales increased 15 percent over the previous year, while wasted stockroom trips to check inventory were reduced by 25 percent.

It's one of a handful of test programs aimed at bringing high-tech into the dressing room, but what remains to be seen is whether the customer is interested. In a recent report "New Future In Store" by market research firm TNS, 73 percent of shoppers said they expect to see touchscreens in dressing rooms in the near future, but only 23 percent said they would be likely to use them.

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Does this RFID tag make me look fat?

High-tech dressing rooms have generated a lot of buzz in the past 18 months, but not a lot of real-world activity. Several high-profile pilots have raked in the news crews and newspaper reporters, but no full-scale deployments are yet on the ground.

"No one has fully deployed this in a customer-facing away," said Patrick Moorhead, director of emerging media for Avenue A Razorfish. "But behind the curtain, there is tons of activity in this space."

Moorhead says his company is working on a number of technologies that are "one or two steps back from being commercially available" — and most of the retailers that are interested in them are boutique retailers rather than big-box. "They're retailers that own their own store footprint in the U.S., and they tightly control the store environment," he said.

A shopper uses the "magicmirror," a technology from Milan-based thebigpicture.

A similar product, the "magicmirror" from Milan-based thebigpicture, has been available for about a year, according to company principal Dick Lockard. It's being piloted in retailers Levis and Throttleman, in the U.S. Mexico, Portugal and France.

At last year's NRF tradeshow, technology designer IconNicholson unveiled its "Social Retailing" dressing room solution to much fanfare. A few months later, the system was used in a pop-up promotion at the Bloomingdale's Nanette Lepore boutique. A high-concept mash-up of clothes shopping and social networking, the system includes a camera that sends a photo of the shopper in his new outfit to selected friends, who can reply with their opinions and even suggest other items from the catalog.

The concept goes back at least as far as 2001, when Prada experimented with RFID tagging and "smart dressing rooms" in its Soho store. That deployment famously ended in tears just a few years later; Business 2.0 magazine called it a "high-tech misstep," citing faulty technology, too-high expectations and a bad attitude on the part of staff as the culprits.

Customer demand and business intelligence

When the concept works, though, it can benefit all involved. Lockard said stores using the magicmirror product are seeing sales uplift between 25 to 40 percent from mirror users over non-mirror users. In the case of Mitsukoshi, the retailer is building a database of customer purchasing trends, according to Ed Jimenez, director of vertical marketing for Cisco. Over time, that should result in a pretty rich set of data to mine for product selection and merchandising ideas.

"Because you make each item unique with an RFID tag, you can gain some business intelligence from the activity," said Tammy Stewart, business development manager for technology company 5stat. A division of 90-year-old retail fixture manufacturer Store Kraft, 5stat sells a turnkey RFID product called the Smart Fitting Room. "Say, certain items are taken into the fitting room frequently but never purchased, or they're being taken into the fitting room but they always ask for a larger size."

Stewart said the Smart Fitting Room is currently being piloted with several retailers, but couldn't disclose any names. 5stat has a similar technology, though, on the sales floor at the company stores of sunglasses maker Oakley. As customers try on glasses, they are automatically shown product information and lifestyle clips in the same mirror they use to gaze lovingly into their own eyes.

Still, perhaps the most important question remains unanswered, because it has largely gone unasked: Do customers really want technology in the dressing room?

"I don't believe consumers are sitting around waiting for these things, but if the tech is designed in a way that delivers enhanced value to whatever they're trying to do, they will adopt it immediately," said Moorhead. "That's the story behind TiVo, that's the story behind most of the Apple technologies, and we're making bets that that's going to be the case with most emerging retail technology. It's not that shopping sucks today, but the availability of technology to the consumer in the shopping experience is going to enhance it for them, and they're going to crave it once they understand that it's available to them."