“...in the middle of the first lockdown Neiman Marcus Connect app was launched which drove $60 million in sales in the first 90 days…” (Forbes, Nov 2020)
It is no longer enough to provide your customers with endless feeds of products online or long aisles of clothes in-store. They already know that this leads to 40% apparel waste!
It’s no longer enough to use smart AI engines for getting tons of personal data and to bombard customers with generic ads via every digital channel possible. This annoys.
Customers are already expecting personalized experiences that improve their shopping journeys disregarding in-store or online and at the right time via the preferred channel.
Personalization in fashion retail includes the styling service experience during interactions with the brand: before, during and after shopping.
The difference between online and omnichannel personalization by McKinsey research can be seen below:
The task now is to fix those gaps and it is really difficult to pick up the right technologies from all that is called “omnichannel” today.
Unmanned stores have been the closest to in-store personalization so far. Costly experiments produced a viable format of functional shopping (mostly for groceries) in terms of inventory flow and a revolutionary checkout possibility. But things like computer vision, beacons, technology detecting the smartphones being costly are not really giving the right data and brand interaction possibilities for fashion retail.
Now let’s imagine the customers give you data on almost everything they do in-store in return for truly personalized service and no spam. And you have data on the body metrics and colour types of shoppers that entered the store, the items they looked at, what they really liked. And on top of that, you have a chance to impress them with real-time personalized styling service during both in-store and online customer journeys. And all you need to do is upload your inventory (plug-and-play).
Sounds unreal? Not at all.
The working examples of such an approach are merchandizing-as-a-service platforms like Stylyze and 7 looks where the users have an app where an AI stylist is curating personalized looks (based on body metrics and preferences) in real-time both in-store or online. A shopper can edit the looks with the items from real-time store inventory and even purchase the look with one click and self-checkout.
This is a completely different omnichannel experience that allows brands to establish unique interactions and valuable relationships with customers who have been waiting for this. And this is a powerful tool to
Just by adding this next-gen technology to your operations, you achieve multiple win-win combinations. Not only customers are happy but you get a triple-digit in-store conversion increase and a 30-40% average order value increase. Returns go down as customers are less likely to return a complete look that is perfectly matching and fitting. You also reduce the 30% unsold goods rate which is the largest inefficiency factor responsible for unnecessary industry emissions and waste.
