7 minute read
A HYBRID HORIZON by Hailey Rednour and Carey McKellar
A HYBRID
The pandemic upended the fashion and beauty industry, but retailers are building back better — and using technology to do it. Here are two ways that retailers are incorporating digital innovation to blend, enhance and elevate the shopping experience.
Two takes on technology and the future of fashion.
by Hailey Rednour and Carey McKellar
ORIZON
Artificial Intelligence: Let’s Get Phygital
by Hailey Rednour
When it comes to clothes and cosmetics, consumers are used to having a choice.
They can experience shopping inperson – interacting with the sales staff, touching fabric, sampling a color – at a brick-and-mortar retail store. They can opt for ecommerce. Or, they can blend the two: checking out the intended purchase in-store, then going to the website to click-to-buy.
The COVID-19 pandemic upended this status quo, ending the ease of in-person shopping. For significant periods of time, ecommerce was the only option. Seizing the opportunity, social media apps expanded their in-app purchasing capabilities, including “quick buy” and “add-to-cart” functionality. Meanwhile, more than 12,000 retail stores closed in the U.S. in the first year of the pandemic alone, according to Fortune magazine.
Now, with data suggesting that the pandemic is waning, shopping options are returning — along with the shoppers. In fact, 32% of Americans are spending more money now than before the pandemic began, with 69% feeling comfortable shopping at a mall and over 75% feeling comfortable shopping at a local store or boutique, according to the research firm Morning Consult.
Why do people love in-person shopping? Simple: It’s the connection. The relationship. The experience. It’s the confidence that can come from trying-before-buying. Which means that ecommerce needs to figure out how to simulate this experience to survive.
Impossible? Not at all! Online retail can stay digital while also providing the feels of an in-person experience thanks to the creation of an approach to retail that experts have dubbed “phygital.” This hybrid approach combines virtual and physical to enhance the overall shopping experience, and it might be the edge ecommerce companies need to succeed. Sampo Parkkinen calls it “relationshipbased ecommerce.” He is the founder and CEO of Revieve, based in Helsinki and Chicago. This consumercentric platform is designed to build connections between consumers and brands. Parkkinen helps beauty and wellness retailers use AI and AR to create a more interactive, personalized ecommerce experience.
Consumers no longer want just an online point of purchase, Parkkinen says. Instead, “they’re looking for someone who they feel understands them, provides them with value and is really their advocate in whichever category they’re looking to shop in.”
Increasingly, that “someone” is artificial intelligence. For example, Revieve’s AI Skincare Advisor replicates the backand-forth between a shopper and an in-store beauty advisor. When a shopper uploads a selfie, it triggers an AI-powered product recommendation engine that, based on its analysis of the selfie (via a proprietary program), interacts with the shopper to understand their concerns, answer their questions and ultimately recommend products or services.
AI is also allowing brands to simulate the excitement of live events, an important element in shopper-brand connection. In fact, 80% or marketers surveyed before the pandemic felt live events were crucial to a brand’s success, according to a 2018 survey by the online event building program Bizzabo.
Foot Locker has long recognized this, says Latese Hickson, the national sportswear retailer’s senior marketing manager. Live events, she says, create authentic connections for shoppers, whether they’re buying online or at a brick-and-mortar store.
“We have to sell our products, but we’ve learned over time that everyone doesn’t necessarily always need to be fed product,” she says. “Sometimes they want to be fed authenticity — you caring about them, caring about their wellbeing, and building a relationship with them.” To do this, she says Foot Locker blends education with entertainment, sponsoring events ranging from yoga classes to speaking engagements that bring professional athletes to high schools.
During the pandemic, however, these inperson experiences ended, just as they ended for every other retailer. Hickson and her team had to think outside the box to create the same connection in a virtual environment.
The result: a collaboration with Nike called Discover Your Air that provides a new online experience every other week. Users could enjoy games, giveaways and even access to a bracketing system to rank their favorite Nike sneakers. Although this program ended, Hickson says the concept was so successful that digital interaction will continue to be part of the company’s brand strategy, even as shoppers return to Foot Locker’s stores.
When digital is done right, she says, it can be “like building a friendship.”
Hailey Rednour is a senior majoring in journalism and fashion media and minoring in Spanish and psychology.
Augmented Reality: The Value of Virtual
by Carey McKellar
What if everyone’s favorite boutique could come to them? Imagine shopping from home — not through a screen, but from a three-dimensional rack of clothes that could be tried on, changed out, examined and admired. That’s the beauty of augmented reality.
Augmented reality enhances the online shopping experience by providing realistic, multi-dimensional representations of products. Images and information can be overlayed onto actual objects, or it can exist independently, allowing shoppers to visualize and engage with virtual products through a smartphone camera, a special viewer or a pair of glasses.
“These are photorealistic assets that you can engage with, configure and have at your fingertips to try on, visualize and compare,” explains Patrick Johnson, CEO and founder of Rock Paper Reality, an augmented reality technology agency in San Francisco. The company recently worked with luxury retailer Saks Fifth Avenue to provide 3D imagery viewable through smart glasses or a smartphone camera. Among the virtual options: browsing a clothing rack, viewing clothing on a mannequin and receiving relevant information and recommendations.
AR technology in the form of “wearable computing” has existed since the 1990s, but the migration to ecommerce caused by the pandemic accelerated its development as a shopping tool.
In 2020, the AR market was valued at 14.7 billion; thanks to the pandemic, that market is expected to increase to 88.4 billion by 2026, according to a 2021 report from ReportLinker, a tech company that uses artificial intelligence to deliver market data and forecasts.
AR’s appeal lies in its ability to improve the shopping experience, says Johnson. It does this in two ways. First, it helps remedy one of the biggest revenuebusters involved in online sales: the return. It also encourages shoppers to feel more confident about their purchases, so they buy more, which boosts the retailer’s bottom line.The fashion industry sees the highest rate of online returns out of any other product category – one study by SaleCycle set the return rate above 50% of all clothing and shoes purchased online. The number one reason consumers return products is because of fit issues, the second top reason is because the product received was different from the photo on a website, according to Narvar, a post-purchase customer experience platform.
AR can help align these expectations, says fashion designer Jenny Seide of Green Neurons, a sustainable product design and development company in Dallas. AR, she says, helps prevent fit issues, serving as a “preventive measure to lower the amount of merchandise being returned.”
It worked for Gucci. The Italian luxury brand launched its first AR try-on app in 2019, allowing shoppers to virtually try on the Ace sneaker by pointing their iPhone camera at their feet. This effort was so successful that in 2020, the brand partnered with Snapchat to offer a sneaker try-on filter available through the social media app. (The filter even directed the shopper to the Gucci website to purchase the pair they just tried on.). This try-before-you-buy option eliminated both disappointed customers and product return costs stemming from this disappointment, according to the business news platform Marketing Dive, while also “driving brand loyalty and future sales.” Ecommerce retailers who use AR to support sales also report higher rates of conversion, the term for the percentage of website visitors who make a purchase. In general, a good conversion rate for ecommerce is between 1% and 4%, according to a 2021 article from OmniConvert, a software company for conversion rate optimization. Adding 3D content to ecommerce can lift convergence by an average of 94%, according to a 2021 ShopifyPlus report on its client retailers and their experience with AR.
In a 2020 study by Vertebrae, a Facebook AR partner that works with Coach, Adidas and other major brands, customer conversion rates increased by 90% for customers who engaged with AR compared to those customers who did not.
When ShopifyPlus vendor Moscot, a family-owned luxury eyewear brand, revamped its website to offer shoppers the opportunity to virtually try on glasses from every angle overlaid on their face, its conversion rates more than doubled, with overall revenue amongst shoppers who engaged with the 3D and VR increasing by 174%.
Ultimately, it’s only a matter of time before every ecommerce fashion platform adopts AR, says Johnson. “Because at the end of the day,” he says, “They’re going to be at a disadvantage because their competitors are going to be using it.”
Carey McKellar is a senior majoring in fashion media and minoring in advertising.
