Online shoppers at UK retailer Hawes & Curtis’ website will soon be able to try on clothes in a virtual fitting room, in what is thought to be a world-first service.
Estonian biorobotics company Fits.me has pioneered an online service that allows shoppers to see how the clothes would look on them, based on their own exact measurements. The service uses robotic mannequins that can simulate nearly 100,000 different body shapes.
Customers enter their height, chest, waistline, arm-length and select a torso type in order to produce photographs of how the clothing would look on them.
Now Fits.me has now teamed up with Jermyn Street business suit and luxury shirt seller Hawes & Curtis to launch the service to the public for the first time.
“This is an exciting e-commerce development that will alter the way our consumers shop,” said Touker Suleyman, owner of Hawes & Curtis.
Fits.me believes a key impact of the new technology, which it says removes the hurdle of shoppers wanting to try clothes on before they buy, will be to reduce the rate of returns.
Heikki Haldre, chief executive and co-founder of Fits.me, said “The initial research trials we’ve conducted with our virtual fitting room have a proven a 28% reduction in online apparel returns, while increasing sales three times over. Retailers can sell more with fewer returns, which directly impacts their profit and loss.”
Currently, it says, 9% of clothing is sold over the internet, a market currently worth $31bn.
Fits.me was founded in 2009 and is based in Estonia and London. It is backed by the Estonian Development Fund and Enterprise Estonia.
