Virtual dressing rooms fit the retail industry

LOS ANGELES – At the Westfield Culver City mall in California, jeans shopper Stephanie Heredia stepped into a booth resembling an airport body scanner. In less than 20 seconds, she walked away with a printout that recommended a dozen denim styles to fit her hourglass-shaped frame.

Paper in hand, she headed to JCPenney to try on a pair of size 12 boot-cut Levi’s. The fit was perfect. And the best part was no shimmying in and out of a stack of styles and sizes to get it.

“Whenever I go shopping for jeans, I have a heck of a time,” said Heredia, 50, a jewelry sales manager from Culver City. “This is something new, more exciting. My son even did it, and he was impressed.”

New technology is making it easier than ever to find clothes that fit and flatter. Size-matching machines are springing up in shopping centers around the country. Free to shoppers, the service means less dressing room drama for customers like Heredia – and the promise of bigger profits for the industry.

Clothing makers, armed with body data collected from shoppers, could sew better-fitting garments and more accurately forecast what sizes to stock. Retailers would save on labor needed to fold and rehang rejected garments. Some are already seeing its potential as a marketing tool.

During a March test of a body scanner aimed at helping shoppers find the right pair of jeans, denim purchases shot up at a Bloomingdale’s store in Los Angeles’ Culver City area, company spokeswoman Marissa Vitagliano said.

Sizing machines are “a great example of using technology to drive sales,” she said. “It’s certainly the wave of the future and we want to be part of that.”

The technology could also help eliminate one of the biggest drawbacks to Internet shopping: returns. More than 20 percent of apparel ordered online gets sent back. Sizing software being developed for home motion-sensing devices like the popular Microsoft Kinect will soon allow consumers to scan themselves in their living rooms before clicking “purchase” on their computer screens.

“It’s disruptive technology that could break open the whole e-commerce apparel space,” said Raj Sareen, chief executive and founder of Styku. The Los Angeles startup has developed a program that measures users’ dimensions and creates personalized on-screen avatars to digitally “try on” clothes. Using specifications provided by clothing manufacturers, the program can figure out whether a dress will fit like a tent or a tourniquet before a shopper ever takes it off the rack.

Sareen said the company plans to sell the tool directly to consumers for home use by the end of the year.

Technology companies say virtual fitting rooms and sizing machines turn the shopping experience into a science. In a typical setup, shoppers step fully clothed into a sizing machine and stand still with their arms outstretched. Thousands of points on the body are then measured and mapped – usually by a motion-sensing device or by a vertical wand containing small antennas – and used to determine a person’s unique shape. A shopper is then matched with specific styles of clothing brands to fit his or her body type based on sizing information gathered from retailers’ actual inventory.

In addition to Styku, players include London-based Bodymetrics, which makes store body-mapping booths, and the Calabasas, Calif., firm FaceCake Marketing Technologies, which has developed a 3-D dressing room called Swivel that allows shoppers to virtually model clothes on a computer monitor or television screen.

Canadian firm Unique Solutions Design Ltd. operates size-matching stations in 65 shopping malls across the U.S. that scan about 200,000 shoppers a month, according to company Chief Executive Tanya Shaw. Dubbed Me-Ality, the machines cost roughly $60,000 to $100,000 each to manufacture and install, said Shaw, who projects that 200 of the company’s machines will be in U.S. malls by the end of the year.