Potential future disruptions from future technological development:
Oak Lap smart mirrors
When we walk in the fitting room to try on clothes we are interested on purchasing, the store might know how many items you carried in but it doesn’t know precisely what items you took in and chose not to purchase. That is where the Oak Labs smart mirrors comes in because it is a fitting room mirror that is so smart that it can track the amount of clothes we are carrying in as well as synchronize with the store’s inventory and point of sale system.
The Oak Labs smart mirror is a full-length interactive mirror with touchable screen. Individual’s retailors can customize the smart mirrors and having them in place can cost between $10,000 to $15,000. One of the first retailors invested in the smart mirrors are Ralph Lauren Corporation, which they have purchased 16 full size touch screen mirror units (Townsend Matthew, Feb 2017)
According to Fast Company (Jun 2017), “sees stores attempting to bring together the best elements of the online and offline experiences. Smart mirrors offer brands data that is generally limited to the e-commerce sphere.” Fast Company took this statement from Petah Marian, a senior editor of retail intelligence at trend forecasting firm WGSN.
[Retailinnovation, Dec 2014]
How does the smart mirrors work?
After selecting the items, you wanted to try on and entering an Oak Labs fitting room, the mirrors would change from the default “resting” states of playing branded content (Type of advertising for their products) and respond to your presence by a change of lighting. If for some reason you dislike the lighting the mirror does offer other light setting choices.
An RFID antenna in the mirror reads the RFID tags on all the clothes carried in and automatically displays all the items side by side on the mirror, along with additional details like other colours and sizes available. If you want to interact with the mirror by touching it and you can select a different colour as well as receiving style recommendations of how to style the product. If you wanted to try on another size, colour or a different product. The smart mirror allows you to tap a choice to notify a member of staff to bring you the requested items because the sale associate would see the request via an iPad app.
When a member of staff gets the request from the fitting them the app doesn’t just notify them that someone requested help from the fitting room. Instead, the app goes a step further by informationing them the exact style, colour and size as well as the exact location where the items are. If the items aren’t at the shop floor then app will notify a member of staff in the stock room.
[Vekardi Maria, May 2017]
Check out process:
Ones the customer presses “I’m ready to check out” button and a member of staff will come out with their iPad to complete the purchase. If the customer wants to purchase the products afterward then they will instantaneously get a text message with the link they can purchase the all items they tried afterwards.
Benefits:
* Retailors can see how quickly and frequently its member of staff responds to requests made via the interactive mirror from shoppers
* Retailors can get a better insight of what products people are purchasing from the ones the take into the fitting room because a product could be taken into the fitting room multiple times but it doesn’t mean it be ending up in people’s shopping basket.
* Receive notifications whenever a request another size or product and transfer item picking to other associates (PredictSpring)
* There are multi language settings within the mirror which allows customers from over the world to be able to use the innovate mirror because sometimes language barrier can be a downside of a customer walking out of the shop empty handed because they’re unable to get the help the wanted
Drawbacks:
* The interactive mirrors are expensive to set up but for luxury brands like Gucci it could be something to increase the shopping experience they provide for their consumers and bring them to another level.
GUCCI TECHNOLOGY 