Zalando takes virtual fitting room pilot to millions of customers
Online fashion retailer Zalando is enhancing the customer experience by piloting a virtual fitting room experience with millions of customers.
The move enables customers to create a 3D avatar by entering their height, weight and gender. They can then select from a range of 22 jeans items to see how different sizes from various brands fit them, with a heatmap indicating where the item sits tight or loose on the avatar they created.
Zalando has already run two pilots with selected items of clothing from Puma and Zalando’s private label Anna Field, which resulted in more than 30,000 customers trying out the technology.
The retailer has its own in-house team dedicated to size and fit. The team uses a combination of fitting models, machine learning, computer vision, and other technologies to predict if items will run big or small.
Stacia Carr, vice president of size and fit at Zalando, said: “Our goal with these pilot campaigns is to learn and understand how customers engage with this new technology so we can develop a seamless scalable solution for the future. We can already see that customer engagement with these campaigns increases and, in fact, around half of the customers try more than one size on the avatar.
The retailer also offers customers personalised size recommendations based on their purchase and return history. as well as information that customers can add to their size profile. For those items where Zalando provides size advice, size-related returns have decreased by 10%.
Zalando’s size and fit team is also working on a body measurement feature where customers will be able to receive personalised advice based on their actual measurements.
Carr added: “We want to support the industry as it continues to adopt and leverage 3D digital design software and workflows to produce fashion. These processes generate digital assets necessary to scale a virtual try-on experience.”
