This retailer is using RFID tags to make face-to-face clothing shopping less frustrating

Buying clothes in person can be a frustrating experience. You walk into the fitting room, try on the item, and find you’ve chosen 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 process again in the fitting room.

Finally, you find the right item in the right size – but now you have to wait in line to make your purchase. What you thought was going to be a quick and easy process has turned into a bit of a chore.

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But, what if there was a retailer that made the entire process of buying clothes in person — from trying on clothes to purchasing items, and even getting more stylish items in the future — more seamless? Have you created experience?

That’s the aim of high street fashion retailer River Island, whose CIO Adam Warne has implemented a range of digital solutions – including radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, sensors, video screens and data analytics – to help clothing shoppers overcome challenges He confronts them to help.

“If you’ve ever been in a fitting room and something isn’t quite right, it can be frustrating,” he says. “The whole initiative started with, ‘How are we going to improve the customer’s life?'”

River Island — which has 250 stores in the UK and a range of franchisees, partners and concessionaires in locations around the world including North America, Europe and the Middle East — uses RFID tags to give each product a unique reference number . Which can be identified in the Smart Fitting Rooms, which include screens to help customers shop.

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“Because we’re RFID-tagged, you can take four or five items into a fitting room, you hang them on a hook, and a screen pops up and it tells you what you took into the fitting room.” ,” says Warne.

“And then if you want a different size, you can press the screen and someone will bring you a different size. So, it’s effectively a customer-enhanced experience that saves some hassle.”

Once items are scanned, customers gain access to the same product information they would find 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 tie together a variety of data sources into a single repository, supporting enterprise-wide efforts to turn information into insights. supports.

In addition to alleviating some of the hassle of in-person shopping, River Island also gains important performance insights from RFID tagging, such as whether a customer had to alter an item to get a different size or tried the product on. Was visited but not bought. ,

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The result, Warne says, is e-commerce-like conversion rates in brick-and-mortar stores, which is the kind of information few retailers have at their disposal.

“It gives the product team fast insight into things people are trying on and not buying or people trying something on and having a different size – maybe we have something wrong with the fit ?” He says.

“Maybe we need to re-label the product to say it’s a different size than it really is because we got the size wrong. Or maybe people are trying it on and no one will buy it.” hasn’t been, so maybe we need to replace it with something else.” Store.”

Interestingly, Warne says that the production of this detailed data about sales and styling was an “afterthought”.

But while the initiative was founded to boost the customer experience, the combination of RFID tagging and Snowflake’s cloud-based platform is now powering data-driven action across the business.

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“The value that we get from having that data is really powerful,” he says. “And what it’s slowly doing is it’s forcing us to think about how we can leverage the data in different ways to the point where we’re coming up with ideas.”

Warne says that e-commerce-style analysis of in-store sales is helping to influence product investment decisions and even the layout design of the store.

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He estimates that about 99.8% of the products at River Island are now RFID-tagged, with the only big exception being liquids in the company’s beauty range (he says the tags don’t work well with liquids).

The smart fitting room is being used in around 20 stores and Warne described the results as “phenomenal so far”.

“The cost of RFID-tagging those items is minimal,” he says. “But when you look at the advantage that tagging gives us in terms of visibility, it’s incredible. Stock checking in stores now takes hours, not days. You just walk around with a scanner and it gives you all that information.” Tells something that’s there.”

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RFID tags are also used to power self-checkout, so customers can get in and out of stores much faster.

When they’re ready to buy, shoppers put their items into a “smart bin,” which automatically scans the RFID tag and generates a bill.

“You put everything in the bin, the items pop up on a screen, you pay, and you walk out,” says Warne. “There’s no de-tagging and no complications. It’s very straightforward.”

River Island’s commitment to technology is not unusual. Gartner says global IT spending in the retail industry will 6.6% growth in 2023 to reach $193.4 billion. The analyst expects spending to grow 7.3% annually to reach $240.7 billion by 2026.

Other big-name brands have also investigated the potential of using RFID tagging and other emerging technologies to power smarter consumer experiences, including Walmart and Walmart. Nike,

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Where River Island’s approach is unusual, Warne says, is the scale of its commitment to emerging technology and its willingness to create a collaborative approach to digital transformation that creates benefits for customers and the company’s bottom line.

“Every few months, I take a walk down Oxford Street in London because so many people have their flagship stores there. The reality is, when I go for those retail experience tours, I don’t really see anyone Is.” It’s a lot different in the High Street,” he says.

“I think there’s a lot of talk about changing the experience in retail and not a lot of action. Some of the things we’re doing at River Island are about doing something different.”

Warn says data-driven efforts will continue with the aim of using all kinds of technology — from RFID tagging to analytics and artificial intelligence — to make the in-store shopping experience less frustrating and more enjoyable.

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“We’ve always been a business that has made fashion affordable for a lot of customers,” he says. “Trends change very quickly and we need to make sure we are still creating the right fashion and best experience for our customers.”