Your shopping habits are about to get a lot smarter—literally—thanks to Ralph Lauren. The American fashion brand is joining forces with tech startup Oak Labs to bring customers a smart shopping experience with new interactive fitting rooms,WWD reports. The new tech driven fitting rooms will be unveiled today at Polo Ralph Lauren's flagship store on Fifth Avenue.
No stranger to fashion tech, Ralph Lauren has already debuted a Polo Tech smart shirt and staged a user interface and 4-D holographic fashion show above Central Park for the brand's Spring 2015 collection.
The new Oak Lab Fitting Rooms will feature touchscreen interactive mirrors (think a life size iPad) for customers to request new sizes, styling suggestions or seek assistance from a sales associate. Upon entering the fitting room, customers will be given the choice of three lighting settings: Fifth Avenue Daylight, East Hampton Sunset and Evening at The Polo Bar (because as any fashion girl knows, lighting is very important). All of the items that a customer brings into the fitting room are recognized through RFID chips so that additional colors, sizes and recommended items appear as options on the screen. Instead of calling for a sales associate—or your shopping partner in crime—customers can then request new items through the touchscreen mirror which will then be delivered to the fitting room via a sales associate. The best part of this shopping experience, perhaps, is that at the end of the fitting room exchange shoppers have the option to skip waiting in line and can instead just instantly check out by pressing the "I'm ready to checkout" button on the screen.
Polo Ralph Lauren is the first store to launch this type of technology although Rebecca Minkoff and Burberry have also debuted various forms of smart fitting rooms as well.
