Online fashion retailer Zalando is piloting a virtual fitting room, allowing customers to try on clothing by creating a 3D avatar and inputting their height, weight, and gender details. The move is part of the company’s efforts to enhance the customer experience.

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Shoppers can select from a range of 22 jeans items to see how different sizes from various brands fit them, with a heatmap indicating where the item sits tight or loose on the avatar they created. The pilot has already been tested with selected items of clothing from Puma and Zalando’s private label Anna Field, resulting in over 30,000 customers trying out the technology.

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Zalando has its own in-house team dedicated to size and fit, using a combination of fitting models, machine learning, computer vision, and other technologies to predict if items will run big or small. The retailer also offers customers personalised size recommendations based on their purchase and return history, as well as information that customers can add to their size profile. According to Zalando, size-related returns have decreased by 10% for those items where they provide size advice.

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The size and fit team are also working on a body measurement feature where customers will be able to receive personalised advice based on their actual measurements.

Stacia Carr, Zalando’s vice president of size and fit, said: “Our goal with these pilot campaigns is to learn and understand how customers engage with this new technology so we can develop a seamless scalable solution for the future. We can already see that customer engagement with these campaigns increases and, in fact, around half of the customers try more than one size on the avatar.”

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The virtual fitting room is part of a larger trend of retailers using 3D digital design software and workflows to produce fashion, which generate digital assets necessary to scale a virtual try-on experience.

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Sources: https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2023/04/zalando-virtual-avatar-fitting-rooms/