Online clothes shopping has a lot going for it, not least being able to avoid hours walking between shops, even if they are in the same shopping centre. You can conveniently browse the collections of multiple clothing and fashion retailers from the comfort of your own home, order what catches your eye and then send back, usually free of charge, items you decide you don’t want after they have arrived.
The downside is the difficulty of getting an accurate impression of how an item browsed online will look and feel in real life. And how it will fit your particular body shape and colouring.
Clothing retailers have embraced e-commerce and many have successfully leveraged it to grow their business by combining it with traditional bricks and mortar shops. Others, with examples in the UK including ASOS and Boohoo, have built entire businesses worth tens to hundreds of millions or even billions of pounds, purely through online clothing sales.
However, the competition is cut-throat and rivals have to make sure the online retail experience is as convenient as possible. That means offering free returns for items ordered that customers decide are not the right fit, style or feel after they’ve tried them on.
While online clothing retailers accept offering free returns of items ordered online as a cost of doing business, it’s a major overhead. Posting garments back and forward also has an environmental impact.
The British tech company Anthropics Technology believes it has an answer that will significantly reduce the number of returns resulting from e-commerce – virtual avatars that represent body and colouring doubles that show how a garment will look on you rather than a model that is most probably a different height, shape and weight as well as having a different skin tone and colour of hair and eyes.
Anthropics has developed a virtual try-before-you-buy app called Zyler that does exactly that. Users first upload a selfie of their face and then provide vital statistics such as height, weight and other measurements such as waist, inner leg length, and bra and dress sizes for women. The app then creates a virtual avatar that should match your body size, shape and your colouring. If not you can adjust things like shoulder width, hips and even neck length.
When the user then clicks on items of clothing, the app transposes them onto the virtual avatar, giving a realistic impression of how it will look on them. The idea is that the technology will not only improve sales for e-commerce clothing retailers but also drastically reduce returns.
Increasing revenues and reducing costs sounds like a no-brainer Anthropics chief executive Alexander Berend is convinced the app will revolutionise the online shopping experience, commenting:
“Online shopping is fundamentally a really bad experience. You see clothes on a model who looks nothing like you and order them, and only when they turn up do you finally get to find out what they actually look like on you. Many then have to be returned, which is bad for retailers and customers.”
For now, just a few smaller retailers are working with Zyler but Anthropics is confident it will soon be adopted by larger brands.