Buying clothes in particular person generally is a frustrating expertise. You go to the becoming room, attempt on the merchandise, and discover you’ve got picked the improper dimension. You then have to dress, return onto the store flooring, get the right-sized merchandise, and undergo the entire course of once more within the becoming room.
Finally, you discover the appropriate merchandise in the appropriate dimension — however now you will have to wait in an extended line to make your buy. What you thought was going to be a fast and straightforward process has became a little bit of a slog.
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But, what if there was a retailer who made the entire course of of shopping for clothes in particular person — from attempting on clothes, to shopping for gadgets, and even securing extra trendy gadgets sooner or later — a way more seamless expertise?
That’s the intention of excessive road trend retailer River Island, whose CIO Adam Warne has carried out a spread of digital options — incorporating radio frequency identification (RFID) know-how, sensors, video screens, and knowledge analytics — to assist clothes patrons overcome the challenges they encounter.
“If you’ve ever been in a fitting room and something doesn’t fit right, it can be frustrating,” he says. “The whole initiative started with, ‘How we are going to improve life for the customer?”http://www.zdnet.com/”
River Island — which has 250 stores in the U.K. and a range of franchises, partners, and concessions in locations around the globe, including North America, Europe, and the Middle East — uses RFID tags to give each product a unique reference number that can be recognized in smart fitting rooms, which include screens to help customers as they shop.
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“Because we’re RFID-tagged, you’ll be able to take 4 or 5 gadgets right into a becoming room, you grasp them on the hook, and a display pops up and it tells you precisely what you’ve got taken into the becoming room,” says Warne.
“And then if you need a distinct dimension, you’ll be able to press the display and any individual will convey you a distinct dimension. So, it is successfully a customer-enhancing expertise that saves some problem.”
Once items are scanned, customers gain access to the same product information they’d get online, such as information on size, color, and material.
The data-led initiative is powered by Snowflake’s Retail Data Cloud, which allows retailers like River Island to tie together a variety of data sources into a single repository, supporting enterprise-wide efforts to turn information into insight.
As well as reducing some of the hassles of in-person shopping, River Island also gleans crucial performance insights from RFID tagging, such as whether a customer had to change an item to get a different size or if a product was tried on but not purchased.
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Warne says the result is e-commerce-like conversion rates in brick-and-mortar stores, which is the kind of information that few retailers have at their disposal.
“That provides quicker perception again to the product crew for issues that persons are attempting on and never shopping for or for individuals attempting one thing on and having a distinct dimension — perhaps we have one thing improper with the match?” he says.
“Maybe we want to re-label the product to say it is a totally different dimension than it really is as a result of we received the sizing improper. Or perhaps persons are attempting it on and no one’s shopping for it, so perhaps we want to change it with one thing else within the retailer.”
Interestingly, Warne says the production of this detailed data about sales and styles was an “afterthought”.
But while the initiative was established to boost customer experiences, the combination of RFID tagging and Snowflake’s cloud-based platform is now powering data-led action across the business.
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“The worth that we get from having that knowledge is actually, actually highly effective,” he says. “And what it is slowly doing is that it is making us take into consideration how we will leverage knowledge for various methods on the level that we’re arising with concepts.”
Warne says the e-commerce-style analysis of in-store sales is helping to influence product investment decisions and even shop layout design.
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He estimates about 99.8% of products at River Island are now RFID-tagged, with the only big exception being liquids in the company’s beauty range (he says tags don’t work well with liquids).
The smart fitting rooms are being used in about 20 stores and Warne describes the results as “phenomenal thus far”.
“The price of RFID-tagging these gadgets is minimal,” he says. “But while you have a look at the profit that tagging provides us by way of visibility, it is unbelievable. Stock checking in a retailer now takes hours, not days. You simply stroll round with a scanner and it tells you every little thing that is there.”
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The RFID tags are also used to power self-checkout, so customers can get in and out of the store much quicker.
When they’re ready to buy, shoppers drop their items into a “sensible bin”, which automatically scans the RFID tags and produces a bill.
“You simply put every little thing within the bin, the gadgets pop up on a display, you pay, and also you stroll out,” says Warne. “There’s no de-tagging and there is not any complexity. It’s very simple.”
River Island’s commitment to technology isn’t unusual. Gartner says global IT spending in the retail industry will grow by 6.6% in 2023 to reach $193.4 billion. The analyst expects spending to grow 7.3% annually to reach $240.7 billion by 2026.
Other big-name brands have also investigated the potential for using RFID tagging and other emerging technologies to power smarter consumer experiences, including Walmart and Nike.
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Where River Island’s approach is unusual is the scale of its commitment to emerging technology and its desire to create a joined-up approach to digital transformation that produces benefits for customers and the company’s bottom line, says Warne.
“Every few months, I’ll go for a wander down Oxford Street in London as a result of that is the place lots of people have their flagship shops. The actuality is that, after I go for these retail expertise visits, I do not actually see quite a bit that is totally different within the excessive road,” he says.
“I feel there’s a number of discuss altering the expertise in retail and never very a lot motion. Some of the issues that we’re doing at River Island are about delivering one thing that is differentiated.”
Warne says these data-led efforts will continue with the aim of using all kinds of technology — from RFID tagging to analytics and artificial intelligence — to make the in-store shopping experience less frustrating and much more enjoyable.
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“We’ve at all times been a enterprise that is made trend reasonably priced for lots of consumers,” he says. “Trends change in a short time and we want to make positive that we’re nonetheless creating the appropriate fashions and one of the best experiences for our prospects.”
…. to be continued
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