As people continue buying more items online, clothing has remained a purchase that most picky dressers prefer to make in a brick and mortar store.  All of that could soon be changing.  Before we discuss that, let’s take a quick look at the status quo for clothing purchases in 2007:

Why Do People Buy Clothing Online?

- Sometimes the clothing is less expensive
- You can buy it in your underwear
- No traffic/crowds
- You can compare from many vendors before choosing
- You have an unlimited inventory to choose from

Why Do People Buy Clothing Offline?

- It is a social activity they engage in with friends
- They want to make sure it feels/fits right
- They want the advice of a salesperson
- It gets them out of the house

I’m sure you can think of a few more personal reasons, but those will be the most common responses. 

We usually hear about advances in website technology which allows us to “make up” for the lack of real life online.  I won’t cover that here (perhaps in a different post), since there are others who have posted about this elsewhere on the internet.  My interest is in the less often discussed revival of the brick and mortar clothing stores.

Over the last few months, several large department stores, as well as specialty clothing stores, have worked hard to bring people back to offline shopping. 

What Have They Done?

Macy’s

Federated, one of the largest department store brands, which owns Macy’s, has recognized one of the major annoyances in offline shopping: The dressing room.

Few people will tell you that they enjoyed the dressing room experience (again, I’ll cover the problems with dressing rooms in a different post).  From being too small to being too hard to being too dim, dressing rooms have long been the worst part of shopping.   Once Federated decided to change all of their stores over to the Macy’s brand, they began looking at ways to improve the design of their stores.  A survey showed them what we all knew individually - we want larger, cleaner, nicer dressing rooms.

Macy’s response, along with some other major brands, was to dramatically increase the size and pleasantness of dressing rooms, realizing the status quo was a sore spot with consumers.

Gap

When Gap rolled out a new brand of clothing store aimed at women over 35, named Forth & Towne, they focused on the shopping experience from the start.  With dressing rooms at the center of the store, and helpful attendants handing customers bottled water, shoppers felt more at ease than anywhere else.  What awaited them in the dressing rooms were well-lit areas and fine furnishings…everything you generally expect from a hotel lobby.

Dressing Room Technology

At the National Retail Federation’s annual conference this year, a company named IconNicholson showed off their vision on dressing rooms.  A small camera located in the dressing room mirror takes the shopper’s video for each outfit the shopper tries on.  The camera has the ability to send the stream to any mobile phone or computer that the shopper wishes to share it with.  The shopper’s friends can then give feedback about the outfit, raising the odds of a satisfied purchase on the part of the shopper.  This brings a new meaning to “social shopping”.  Want to see how it works? Visit the Interactive Dressing Room Mirror.

We see new technology coming out every day but it is important to note that we don’t adopt it in one shot, rather we slowly adopt certain parts of it (usually to suit the “current way of doing business” instead of making a whole new way of doing business).  So, for the foreseeable future, we should expect continued improvements in the offline retail environments, specifically in types of retail that needs to be touched, tried on, or just seen in person to believe.