Paris - As high-end shoppers become increasingly mobile and
connected, luxury retailers are testing new technologies that promise a more
seamless experience between the physical and online worlds.
At a “Store of the Future” event at London’s Design Museum,
the luxury e-commerce platform Farfetch showed off connected clothing racks,
touch screen enhanced mirrors and sign-in stations that could help put data
collected from customers online to use in stores, as well as harvesting material
gathered during store visits to ease later orders on the web.
“How do you capture all of that fantastic information you
gather in stores where customers touch and feel products?” asked Gavin
Williams, head of product development at Farfetch.
Farfetch showed a scanner for customers to “log in” with
their Smartphones when they enter a store, allowing sales assistants to view
customers’ profiles, including what items they may have previously bought or
saved to a wish list online.
Read also: What's the deal with online purchases?
The connected clothing rack records items customers pick up,
storing them in a Smartphone app where they can later swipe left or swipe right
to edit selections. The smart mirror allows shoppers to request items in
another size browse online alternatives and even pay without leaving the
dressing room.
The company also showed off a holographic display that
enables customers to create and order custom shoes experimenting with different
leathers, skins and colours from the brand Nicholas Kirkwood.
Created in 2008 as an e-commerce portal for luxury
boutiques, Farfetch has increasingly positioned itself as a technology
provider. In March, it launched the e-commerce portal for high-end shoe
designer Manolo Blahnik, pushing into a space where competitor Yoox Net A Porter
Group SpA has been a leader.
The company has also announced that it was working with
Kering-owned Gucci to provide 90-minute express deliveries of the brand in 10
cities.
Farfetch will roll out the suite of technologies later this
year at the boutique Browns in London, which the company purchased in 2015, and
at the flagship store for designer Thom Brownw in New York.
BLOOMBERG