Lingerie retailer Adore Me wants to give off a tech vibe when shoppers enter its stores, says Camille Kress, director of retail at Adore Me.
Instead of posters featuring its current lingerie collections, it uses TV screens that run its promotions. This also allows Adore Me to update the screens as soon as its creative is ready—and not have the printing costs.
It also has a smart mirror in its fitting rooms and a body scanner at a few of its stores. The smart mirror knows which products the shopper brought into fitting room via an RFID tag on the product. RFID, or radio-frequency identification, is a common way retailers keep track of inventory in a store. On the mirror, the shopper can request a different size or color of the product without the shopper needing to get dressed to talk to an associate. The mirror will ping an associate’s tablet, so she can bring that product back to the fitting room, as well as additional products, such as matching panties or if the associate knows the same product in black is a best-seller, Kress says.
The body scanner is a machine that takes all of a shopper’s measurements and then emails the customer her best size for Adore Me’s bras, panties and sleepwear. For now, Adore Me is not using the email addresses from the body scanner to remarket to those shoppers, but that might be a consideration in the future, Kress says.
Adore Me just installed the body scanner in November 2019, and Kress estimates about 10% of shoppers who walk into the store use it. Shoppers who use the scanner convert two-times the amount as a shopper who does not use it, Kress says. Adore Me attributes the conversion to the body scanner if the shopper buys immediately after using it in store or buys online while in store.
Digitally native brands integrate technology in stores differently than traditional retail chains typically do. From the get-go, many digital natives have a mobile point-of-sale system, which allows associates to checkout shoppers from anywhere in the store. But just because digital natives have the latest hardware, doesn’t mean they implement every omnichannel feature.
Many of these brands justify a lack of these omnichannel features with the fact that they don’t have a large store footprint. Of the 66 digitally native vertically integrated brands Digital Commerce 360 tracks in its Top 1000, 22 of them operate at least one store. The median number of stores is three. Comparatively, the median number of stores for retail chains in the Top 1000 is 413. With a small store fleet, digital natives don’t want to promote a limited number of store locations and features, when it will only apply to a fraction of their web audience. Plus, a handful of digitally native vertically integrated brands operate showrooms, and thus don’t have the inventory available to offer omnichannel features, like buy online pick up in store. But these digitally native brands are still using technology to creatively linking their ecommerce site and stores.
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