At present I am on a 3 week work placement with VGroup. I’d like to thank the team for taking their time in teaching me the stepping stones to success. They are great people to work with.
The background to this subject is from my final major project with convincing ladies to enjoy shopping online. Every woman deserves a good shopping spree so how can retailers improve the consumer experience online.
The issue began with when purchasing clothes online you can never guarantee the fit or suit on the individual. The online fashion market is worth 4.27 billion in 2009 and is predicted to increase significantly between 2010-2013. With a large number of new comers to the online fashion market, the market place has become saturated and diluting shares. With this in mind it is vital that online fashion participants are satisfying the needs and wants of their consumers to gain a competitive advantage over others.
A strong insight into consumers buying habits are trying clothes on with half of women saying so and also a third admitting that items have not met to their expectation according to Mintel Group, suggesting not enough visualization of detail and imagination of how an item would look like on the consumer.
The new online feature trends that have been identified are outfit makers and virtual fitting rooms.
Retailers such as Boden and Oasis have examples such as ‘outfit maker’ and ‘fittingroom’ on their websites. These features you simply dress the model to create outfits. Also catwalk videos are illustrating a better idea of the garment detail with the movement of the material on the model, which is becoming extremely popular with online retailers.
Taking it one step further there are virtual fitting rooms where you can place items onto one self through webcams, upload a picture of yourself or type their measurements in where a mannequin is produced. Examples can be seen on knickerpicker.com and in this video.