Zalando Tests Virtual Fitting Rooms — Retail Bum

Fashion retailer Zalando is piloting virtual fitting rooms in 25 markets, including France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands and the U.K.

The virtual fitting rooms allow shoppers to create a 3D avatar by sharing details such as gender, height and weight. All of this information is then processed to show how various pairs of jeans from different brands would fit, with a heat map indicating the areas where it might feel loose or tight.

Zalando noted that it chose to test out the program with jeans as it is one of the most challenging categories in terms of finding the right size due to the lack of sizing standards.

“Our goal with these pilot campaigns is to learn and understand how customers engage with this new technology so that we can develop a seamless, scalable solution for the future,” said Stacia Carr, vice president of size and fit at Zalando. “We already see that the customer engagement with those campaigns increases and, in fact, around half of the customers try more than one size on the avatar.”

“Our goal with these pilot campaigns is to learn and understand how customers engage with this new technology so that we can develop a seamless scalable solution for the future,” she added. “We already see that the customer engagement with those campaigns increases and, in fact, around half of the customers try more than one size on the avatar.”

The company’s virtual firing room technology utilizes a combination of computer vision and machine learning, among other technologies, to estimate how a piece of clothing would fit on a customer’s body. Zalando is currently the only retailer in Europe that is testing the technology. As a next step of the pilot, the company is developing a new feature that would give customers recommendations based on their actual measurements.

Originally published at https://retailbum.com on April 28, 2023.