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'Marie Claire' shop of the future is stuck in the present
Traditional retail may be failing, but it's giving way to tech-infused showrooms. Marie Claire, Neiman Marcus and Mastercard teamed up to showcase some of the concepts that will be driving that development in their New York City pop-up shop, The Next Big Thing. The store is open to the public every day until Oct. 12th, at 120 Wooster Street in trendy SoHo, and according to the invite, it's "a first-to-market, hands-on retail pop-up experience bringing to life the newest innovations in fashion, beauty, entertainment, technology and wellness."
Your mall will basically have to be psychic to survive
Repeat after me: Shopping is therapy. Whether you believe it or not, the rush some of us get from buying a new dress or gadget can be cathartic. And in the not-too-distant future, real-world shopping will get so seamless that it could feel like the store is actually psychic. But it's not just about flashy displays of bleeding-edge tech. Instead, expect a subtler approach that focuses on understanding your tastes to find you your next outfit while you're in the fitting room, all in the right size. Stores will learn to recognize you as you browse and change dynamically to show things that matter more to you so you won't have to be disappointed by missing sizes or sift through stuff you wouldn't have bought anyway.
Ralph Lauren starts testing interactive fitting rooms in NYC
Ralph Lauren isn't afraid to experiment with new tech. Last year, the brand introduced a smart shirt for athletes, designed to measure performance with conductive silver threads and other tracking sensors. To add to this, Ralph Lauren's announced it will begin testing interactive fitting rooms at its Polo flagship store in New York City. These smart mirrors, created by a startup called Oak Labs, are capable of recognizing a customer's clothing pieces via RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags and displaying these on a large touchscreen. Once that happens, you can request different sizes and colors of items in your possession, which are then brought over to you by a Polo associate. From there you're able to keep trying on different looks or simply check out -- and if you don't speak English, there's support for Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Italian and Portuguese.
