Buying clothes in person can be a frustrating experience. You go to the fitting room, try the item on, and find that you chose the wrong size. Then you have to get dressed, go back to the shop floor, get the right size item, and go through the whole fitting room process again.
Finally, you’ll find the right item in the right size — but now you have to wait in a long line to make your purchase. What you thought would be a quick and easy procedure turns out to be a bit of a slog.
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But, what if there was a retailer that did the entire process of buying clothes in person — from trying on clothes, to buying items, and even securing more follow-up items in the future? — a more seamless experience?
That’s the goal of high street fashion retailer River Island, whose CIO Adam Warne is implementing a variety of digital solutions — including radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, sensors, video screens, and data analytics — to help apparel buyers overcome challenges. they encountered.
“When you’ve been in a fitting room and something doesn’t fit, it can be frustrating,” she said. “The whole initiative starts with, ‘How do we improve life for the customer?'”
River Island — which has 250 stores in the UK and various franchisees, partners, and concessions in locations around the world, including North America, Europe, and the Middle East — uses RFID tags to identify each product. a unique reference number to identify the smart fitting rooms, which include screens to help customers while they shop.
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“Because we have an RFID tag, you can bring four or five items into a fitting room, you hang them on a hook, and a screen pops up and it tells you what what you brought to the fitting room,” said. Warne.
“And then if you want a different size, you can press the screen and someone will bring you a different size.
Tagged items are automatically scanned in digital fitting rooms. River Island
When items are scanned, customers get access to the same product information they get online, such as size, color, and material information.
The data-driven initiative is powered by Snowflake’s Retail Data Cloud, which allows retailers like River Island to consolidate various data sources into a single repository, supporting enterprise-wide information creation efforts. to understanding.
As well as reducing some of the hassles of in-person shopping, River Island is also gaining important performance insights from RFID tagging, such as whether a customer needs to change a item to get a different size or if a product was tried but not purchased. .
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Warne says the result is conversion rates similar to e-commerce in brick-and-mortar stores, which is the kind of information few retailers have at their disposal.
“That gives faster insight back to the product team for things that people tried on and didn’t buy or for people that tried on something and had a different size – maybe we got the wrong fit ?” he said.
“We may have to relabel the product to say it’s a different size than it really is because we got the measurement wrong. the store.”
Interestingly, Warne said that creating this detailed data about sales and styles was an “afterthought”.
But while the initiative was built to improve customer experiences, the combination of RFID tagging and Snowflake’s cloud-based platform is now driving data-led action across the business.
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“The value we get from having that data is really, really strong,” he said. “And what it does slowly is that it makes us think about how we can use the data for different ways to the point where we have ideas.”
Warne: “If you look at the benefit that tagging gives us in terms of visibility, it’s unbelievable.” River Island
Warne says analyzing the e-commerce style of in-store sales can help influence product investment decisions and even store layout design.
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He estimates that about 99.8% of River Island’s products are now RFID-tagged, with the only big exception being the liquids in the company’s beauty range (he says the tags don’t work well with liquids) .
The smart fitting rooms are being used in around 20 stores and Warne described the results as “amazing so far”.
“The cost of RFID tagging things is very low,” he said. “But if you look at the benefit that tagging gives us in terms of visibility, it’s incredible. Checking stock in a store now takes hours, not days. You just walk out with one scanner and it tells you everything that’s there.”
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RFID tags are also used to power self-checkout, so customers can enter and exit the store faster.
When they’re ready to buy, shoppers drop their items into a “smart bin”, which automatically scans RFID tags and generates a bill.
Store tills are smart too. River Island
“You put everything in the bin, things pop up on a screen, you pay, and you walk out,” Warne said. “No de-tagging and no complexity. Very straightforward.”
River Island’s commitment to technology is not unique. Gartner says global IT spending in the retail industry will grow 6.6% in 2023 to $193.4 billion. Analysts expect spending to grow 7.3% annually to reach $240.7 billion by 2026.
Other major brands are also exploring the potential for using RFID tagging and other new technologies to leverage smarter consumer experiences, including Walmart and Nike.
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Where River Island’s approach is unusual is the extent of its commitment to advancing technology and its desire to create an integrated approach to digital transformation that produces benefits for customers and the bottom line. company line, Warne said.
“Every few months, I go for a walk down Oxford Street in London because that’s where a lot of people have their flagship stores. It’s a lot different from the high street,” he said.
“I think there’s a lot of talk about changing the retail experience and less action. Some of the things we’re doing at River Island is about delivering something different.”
Warne says these data-led efforts will continue with the goal of using all kinds of technology — from RFID tagging to analytics and artificial intelligence — to make the in-store shopping experience less overwhelming. frustrating and more fun.
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“We’ve always been a business that makes fashion affordable for more customers,” he said. “Trends change very quickly and we need to make sure we are still creating the right trends and the best experiences for our customers.”
