AI and AR in the Fashion Industry

“Let’s go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday.”

Steve Jobs

Technology is making its way through every domain and how can the fashion industry be untouched. In a recent report published by Deloitte, mentions all the megatrends which is soon going to take over the world. Few of them were – Additive Manufacturing, Blockchain Systems, Crowdsourcing, Data Monetization and of course, what we are going to discuss today – Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality.

The kind of consumers we are going to witness in the coming times, myriads of fashion brands are implementing AI and AR to enhance the experience for their customers. As we know, that 50% of the population in India are under the age of 30, this percentage includes all the Millenials and GenZ. These 2 generations are tech savvy since they grew up with the internet and technology and hence, demand for latest technologies is one of the main reasons for the brands to implement them as well.

AI and AR has been transforming the entire process from the time the products are manufactured up till the time they are marketed and sold. It has been incorporated in Value Chains as well. This is no hidden fact that due to technology and automation, a lot of fashion brands use it in order to maximize users shopping experience, improve the sales systems through intelligent automation, and improve sales processes using predictive analytics and guided sales processes. To name a few, many brands are also leveraging many chatbots or voice machines, like Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Home, and Microsoft Cortana. Such voice assistant devices help in conversational interfaces, which help gathering data by asking customers questions, understanding customer desires and trends, diving deeper into their purchase patterns and suggesting related and add-on items.

Many global brands like Zara, H&M are already using these at a great scale but in India, the adoption of these technologies in retail is at a very basic stage. Let us look at some of the examples.

1. First up, we have ‘Rent It Bae’ – It was launched in 2016 and offers subscription for designer pieces and other clothing items at affordable prices. A screen installed inside the store, gives the customers all the necessary details like the price of the product, fabrics, rental charges, sizes available and a lot of other information and that too just by placing a particular merchandise in front of the smart screen. 

2. Then we have ‘Cafe Tresor’. It is a premium service centre exclusively opened for Apple users. The store is equipped with a virtual assistant, ‘Alisha’, with enhanced AI capabilities for a smooth and fast customer experience. ‘Alisha’ is equipped with speech recognition, computer vision, voice-to-text and text-to-voice operations.

3. Tanishq is one of the leading and trusted jewellery retailers in India. It has partnered with Milestone brandcom, to install AR kiosks at the Delhi and Bangalore airports in order to increase the overall shopping experience of the customers. The kiosk uses a VR enabled technology called ‘MirrAR’, which lets the customers to try a jewellery item as many times as they like.

4. Lenskart offers 3D face modelling. What it does is, the technology virtually maps and measures the users face from multiple angles and by swiping upon an image of a particular frame, it shows how the frame would look on the users face. This online trial has helped people provide preferences and make the whole process of frame selection faster and fun for the customers.

5. ‘Wanna Kicks’ a smartphone app uses AR to let customers ‘try on’ sneakers. One can simply choose a pair from the 3D models of shoes and then by pointing the camera at the feet, the consumer can virtually see the ‘tried on’ virtual sneakers, which helps him get a better idea of the product. It also tracks movement as the customer moves their feet.

The technologies have really seeped deep and contributed a lot in all domains in a huge way and will continue to do so in the future, making work for humans a lot easy and fun. Be it a fashion consumer or a fashion retailer, Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality have helped tackling challenges in an innovative way. The inception of these two were welcomed positively and many more technological innovations are heading our way, which will definitely drive and shape the fashion industry that no one imagined!