A new body-measurement app is using augmented reality (AR) to help consumers, including competitive athletes, nail the right apparel fit and reduce returns.
Rebel Athletic, a couture athletic clothier, and technology provider SevenTablets debuted Fit Freedom, an AR body-measurement app for retail garment sales. The Dallas-based companies co-developed the app, which uses a smartphone camera to provide users with seamless body measurements.
“We are on the cusp of a future where any smartphone will scan a person’s body and convert that scan into accurate measurements to determine the person’s sizes, including length adjustments, across multiple product lines,” Karen Noseff Aldridge, Rebel Athletic founder and president, said. “Utilizing a complex algorithm, we are completely solving traditional, recurring issues that face every clothing sales business with technology that measures more accurately than a real-life tailor.”
Both companies initially designed the app for competitive team sports, employee uniforms and other large groups that required custom apparel. Rebel Athletic’s national sales team is currently using the app to scan and measure competitive cheerleaders and dancers for custom-size team practice wear, warm-ups and uniforms.
According to the companies, Fit Freedom can yield body measurements that are accurate within half an inch, allowing consumers to cut costs on exchanges and returns for ill-fitting garments. The first app release leverages various technologies, including advanced feature recognition and a machine-learning algorithm, that generate body-measurement details, including hip-to-leg-width ratios and shoulder-to-wrist length.
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Using the app, coaches can scan team members’ bodies, and record and save their individual measurements for future orders. The app also integrates with other Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms, including Salesforce, enabling team sales representatives to seamlessly upload measurements for bulk or individual orders.
“Fit Freedom solves a business problem that the world’s largest retailers have been trying to address for decades: how to reduce the volume of returns along with increase customer satisfaction,” Shane Long, SevenTablets’ president, said. “This sales-enablement tool caters to an increasingly selective customer and empowers organizations and individual buyers to get the perfect fit every time, either in-person or online.”
Fit Freedom comes amid a push toward technology that can help to achieve better-fitting apparel, reduce returns and offer a more customized shopping experience for consumers.
In April, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) created a 3-D human-modeling technology that it said can digitally reconstruct a person’s shape and size measurements from two full-body photographs.
Powered by computer graphic and vision technology, PolyU said the 3-D technology can extract more than 50 accurate size measurements of different body parts, including arm length, shoulder slope and the perimeters of the bust, calf, hip, knee, neck, waist and thigh. Other technology companies, including 3D Look and Nettelo, enable consumers to take body measurements in the comfort of their own homes, eliminating brick-and-mortar store trips or frequent and time-consuming returns.