Tech Tackles The Fitting Room

You’re out shopping and you’ve spotted a dress you like. You wander on over to the fitting room to try it on — only to find that it doesn’t quite fit. What do you do now? Will you slip into your old clothes, get back out there on the floor, pick the right size, and try it on again? Michelle Tinsley, director of mobility and secure payments in the retail solutions division at Intel, predicts that unless you’re really in love with that dress, those chances are pretty slim. The numbers back her up. Intel’s internal research found that a whopping 73 percent of the time, consumers browse online but then buy in store. “When you take that effort, you go into the store, you actually want to complete [the transaction], so you’re going to be irritated or mad if you drove all the way to the store only to be forced back online,” Tinsley says. “We found that people only go into a dressing room once and get undressed once. If they can’t get the right size and the right fit and they leave the dressing room, it’s very hard to get them to go back into the dressing room a second time.” This, for retailers, is a problem — one they’re increasingly looking to solve with technology. Sure, there are fitting rooms with call buttons you can push for sales help, but even such solutions are not the fix that many are looking for. Enter: the smart fitting room. Read more at Racked.