Try on jeans virtually? A current pilot project by Zalando aims to make exactly that possible and is bringing a virtual changing room to customers in all 25 stores of the Berlin online mod retailer.
The project is part of Zalando’s Size & Fit initiatives and allows customers to create a 3D avatar of their own body. For this purpose, height, weight and gender must be specified before the fits of 22 articles from different brands can be tried on virtually, according to Berlin on Monday. How exactly the jeans fit on one’s own body is to be visualized by means of a thermal image in which color assignments indicate where the trousers are tight or loose.
Zalando chose the jeans because it is one of the most difficult product categories, as there are no size standards, the statement said. It is the online mod retailer’s second pilot campaign in which the virtual changing room is being tested. The first campaign was carried out with selected items from Puma and the company’s own brand Anna Field.
“With the pilot campaigns, we want to understand how customers use the new technology,” says Stacia Carr, VP Size and Fit at Zalando. “On this basis we can develop a scalable solution for the future. We can already see that interest in the campaigns is growing: around half of the customers have tried more than one size on the avatar.”
Since last week, Zalando has also been testing a ‘Fashion Assistant’ that uses the artificial intelligence (AI) of the chatbot “ChatGPT”.