The union between fashion and tech has finally taken a major step forward. The fitting room, formerly nothing more than a tiny lit closet with a full-length mirror, can now offer useful information on the clothes - from pricing and sizing to accessories customers may also want to check out. Iconic fashion brand Ralph Lauren has integrated its fitting rooms with new “smart mirrors” from software company Oak Labs, incorporating NXP’s latest RAIN RFID IC UCODE 7.
Items brought into the fitting room are detected by reading their RFID tags, prompting an item quantity number to pop up on the touch-screen mirror. Shoppers can view unique item details, request alternate colors or sizes, view stylist recommendations or request to help from an associate for a more engaging person-to-person experience. The interactive mirror also gives consumers the option of five additional languages: Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Mandarin and Japanese, so even non-English speaking shoppers can take advantage of the tech.
The Oak Fitting Room is the company’s first step towards developing a larger ecosystem of hardware & software for connected retail spaces.
In addition to creating a more magical customer experience, the smart fitting room will empower retailers with a host of new, unparalleled data that has never been collected throughout the history of retail. With the help of the insight collected from Oak’s proprietary analytics dashboard, retailers will be able to measure fitting room “sessions” – including volume, duration, and conversion, and track SKU velocity in and out of fitting rooms, as well as conversion rates of specific SKUs which can be fed back to the merchandising teams.
Retailers can also reduce the inherent inefficiencies around today’s fitting room experiences: no waiting for associates, no asking for additional items and then waiting to see if it’s in stock, and no need to get dressed to go out and ask for help. This technology supported fitting room also enables retailers to better understand the nature of associate-shopper interactions and response times.
About NXP’s RAIN RFID IC UCODE 7
The UCODE 7 IC EPC Gen2 RFID chip offers excellent performance and features for the most demanding RFID tagging applications. With its leading edge RF performance for any given form factor, UCODE 7 enables long read distance and fast inventory of dense RFID tag population. The chip design enables manufacturing of global RFID labels with best-in-class performance over worldwide regulations. The device provides an automatic self pre-serialization feature for 96-bit EPC, following the industry aligned Multi Vendor Chip-based serialization scheme (MCS), and a Parallel encoding feature which improves and simplifies the tag initialization process. UCODE 7 also offers a Tag Power Indicator for RFID tag initialization optimization and a Product Status Flag for Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) application.
