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Photo: Courtesy of Flickr.com
Technology has integrated itself into almost every aspect of our lives, boasting different applications that make everyday tasks in our lives less strenuous. Save for the creation of online shopping platforms, making it possible for us to buy our favorite brands from almost anywhere, the retail experience has remained generally stagnant of automated advancements until the past few years. Now, with the rising relevancy of startups and the shared economy, new ideas are being injected into retail.
At the tail end of 2015, Polo Ralph Lauren debuted its first ‘Oak Fitting Room’ with a touchable mirror allowing occupants to request different items or alert and attendant if they need assistance. This space age additive was created by Oak Labs, a tech startup that is injecting gadgetry into the retail world and making shopping more convenient for customers.
“Oak Labs was founded to revolutionize the retail experience. The ethnography of customer use-case and the subsequent inclusion of a solution that makes those use-cases better,” explains CEO & Co-founder Healey Cypher, “Analog or digital, it’s all about making the customer’s life easier. Customer’s come first, everything else follows.”
Using “integrated commerce” Oak Labs and their inventive fitting rooms are introducing consumers to technology that can help them make convenient, more informed shopping decisions.
The Fitting Rooms, as exotic as they may seem, may be heading of a retail revolution brought on by the new needs of consumers. A report published by global shopping center developer Westfield Corporation expressed consumers’ heavy interest in “Enhanced Reality Retail” or retail that incorporates reality-bending technologies like virtual reality and headsets into their shopping experience. And with the shared economy making waves in the various markets they are disrupting, the report also expressed how shoppers, New Yorkers most of all, are interested in the idea of renting products rather than committing to buying them. These combined trends appear to forecast retail’s need to accommodate consumer demands of convenient, tech-laden tools in order to stay relevant.
Cypher echoes what the report expresses stating, “The retail industry has reached a challenging juncture, where a shopper’s expectations of connectivity, personalized experiences & interactivity between online & offline are melding together. Very little has changed in the client’s experience at a retail store in the last 100 years. There are few industries more globally influential than retail. If you want to change how people engage with the physical world, you start with retail. We’re currently at a moment of tremendous change. The past few years have seen an acceleration of mobile technology which condition consumers’ expectations every day – and we’re finally at a point where we are going to see retail not just meet, but beat those expectations. The future of retail will seamlessly infuse technology into physical experiences – will beautifully provide the immersion of tactile senses with the ease and simplicity of digital design, and will be much, much more intelligent. The future of retail is not about mobility – it’s about tangibility.”
In 2016, Oak Labs hints at new exciting store launches to look out for. In the wake of what looks to be a new trend in shopping, touchable Oak Dressing Rooms could be the new normal in the near future.
-by Johanna Silver