It’s no secret that e-commerce has been growing in recent years, and the Covid crisis has further accelerated the shift to online shopping.
But even amid new marketing strategies and point-of-purchase efficiencies, the issue of fit still persists. Buying clothing on the web is often a game of chance, and it has the potential to leave shoppers frustrated. That consternation extends to retailers, who then have to contend with mountains of returns—some of which can’t be re-sold due to damage.
Retail technology platform 3DLook aims to help brands optimize fit by arming them with actual consumer data. “Apparel companies throughout the industry have struggled with gaining customer satisfaction when it comes to creating perfectly fitting garments, and the challenge has accelerated with the rise of e-commerce during the lockdown,” said 3DLook co-founder and chief product officer Alex Arapov.
New body shape analytics software could be the feature brands and manufacturers need to better align their products with actual shoppers, according to 3DLook. The solution, which launched Monday, augments the company’s existing size and fit recommendation software.
Apparel companies will now receive access into 3DLook’s existing consumer data set—which pinpoints more than 70 points of measurement on each individual’s body—as well as insights into how they are actually shaped. This new data set can be used to adjust grade rules to create better fitting products, while also identifying new demographic opportunities.
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“Apparel brands will have visibility into not only the measurement data of their customers, but also segmented body shape data where they will have several views in their dashboard,” Whitney Cathcart, 3DLook co-founding chief strategy officer, told Sourcing Journal. These perspectives will allow brands to analyze gender, height, weight, and shape distribution by geography.
“The goal is to better understand customers’ body data to better align fit in the product development process to reduce waste,” she said, as well as enabling “more intelligence relevant to distribution to better predict inventory.”
They company’s 3D-modeling software generates data from just two front and side view photos of each shopper. 3DLook analyzed more than 100,000 unique customer profiles, identifying attributes unique to their data, and segmented body shapes based on different angles and measurements.
“We’ve spent the last couple of years working on expanding our body shape analysis of our large internal proprietary dataset,” Cathcart said, adding that 3DLook has refined its algorithms and created new datasets based on the large volume of 3D body scans it has received in recent months.
Not only can brands utilize these insights during the product development process, but they can implement 3DLook’s body shape analytics on the front end, too. The company’s consumer-facing YourFit solution, which provides size and fit recommendations to shoppers through a widget placed on a brand’s website, will help optimize the shopping experience while actively collecting more data.
“With this new feature, businesses will not only have access to body measurement data but to new reports on the shape data of their customers,” Cathcart said.
Just a few short months into the retail lockdown, 3DLook released a consumer-facing augmented reality solution that allows shoppers to virtually “try on” a garment using a 3D avatar, personalized using their measurements, for more effective online shopping.