Our capacity of conceiving, manufacturing and using tools with the intention of improving our lives is our day-to-day challenge. This constant desire of augmenting our human capabilities is what makes us special. So, let’s dive into the connected environment we surround ourselves with…
Connected home 🏠
Modern homes tend to have multiple appliances, each serving specific purposes. What if we could connect all these appliances together and be able to control each one from a distant? well, google home (Hands-free help) made it possible featuring: control smart lighting systems, control the home security, plan your day-to-day energy consumption, listen music through connected speakers, ask Siri for specific informations, ... While smart appliances helps center the controlling system, it needs to be enhanced by a security system, somehow, stored in the cloud ☁️.
Enhancing the retail experience 🛒
An experience rather than a purchase
Enhancing the retail industry would need thousands and thousands of beacons connected to each other, talking to each other. What is a beacon? A beacon is a small Bluetooth radio transmitter. It’s kind of like a lighthouse 🚨: it repeatedly transmits a single signal that other devices (smartphones, etc...) can see. It let companies gather relevant information such as the on-the-go purchaser behaviour and product or smartphones data to obtain relevant user insights. All this is giving the wearer access to better prices, special offers and discount. Welcome to the store of the future…
Blockchaining ⛓
Rapid technological developments, the pervasiveness of mobile commerce, the rise of a new type of consumer, fast movement to customer-centric retailing and personalised shopping experiences, demand fundamental changes in fashion. Changes very much needed to achieve customer satisfaction, business growth, and profitability.
New innovative technology such as graphene-based textiles able to gather the wearer’s body electricity.
Some sort of style-matching artificial intelligence powered fashion assistant apps.
Smart jackets measure heart rates, self-lacing shoes track steps.
Skin-like garments protect you from the surrounding environment. More than that, all future garments will let you know who made them, when, how and where to recycle them.
Smart fitness shoes are even on the way!
3D Print this s***
The new wave of cheaper, smaller, and faster 3D printers are behind industry-changing creation. Such innovative pieces of design have already transformed the value-chains of several industries, including the apparel industry. In fashion, 3D printing technology affects supply, production, logistics, and even consumption. Some benefits but not all are:
It reduces overstock as the inventory is just virtual. Variations are open to the public and put online. Customers just need to customize their piece directly on the company’s website and print it either at home or to a nearby center, at a fraction of the cost.
It shortens the lead times to personalize a unique model on-demand and be delivered with a final view of your prototype even faster.
It permits to create even more complex jewelry pieces that we were not supposed to create with old techniques. Few 3d printers are even able to print a piece directly in gold reducing the cost of a prototype that directly reduces waste.
Wearable fashion 👕
According to Statista, the global fashion market is expected to reach $3.4 trillion by 2020. Just like food, everybody needs clothes; it is something that we all need every day. While the requirements of wearing clothes might never change, the garments we wear and their composite materials keep changing, evolving all the time. The apparel sector has come a long way, from times of animal skins used as rudimentary forms of garments to the modern era of smart textiles (smart and conductive fabrics: waterproof, keep you warm, cool, protected, or dry), cognitive dresses, nanotech infused garments, soon to be put on the blockchain. A blockchain is a list of growing records called blocks. These records (blocks) are linked together and secured using cryptography. Each block contains a hash pointer as a link to a previous block, a timestamp, and transaction data. By design, blockchains are temper resistant therefore the cannot be modified once recorded on the ledger. In fashion, such technology can prove vital avoiding counterfeiting and greenwashing, tracing down to their original manufacturer.
Smart labeling 🔌
The idea of smart labels is nothing new. Smart labels are used to mark food, smartphones, toys, clothes and even humans. Smart labels provide an end-to-end product lifecycle management while also allowing the buyers to learn more about the ‘story’ behind the product, as in the materials, provenience, warranty, or how to best care for the product.
Hey Siri, where can I buy a diamond ring for my wife?
Farfetch and the store of the future is closer than you think. As the Internet-based fashion commerce is growing, its share of the market against the classic retail stores, consumers’ expectations are also changing. This is your chance to rethink what the future fashion store will look like. However, while the required technology is already here, the fashion industry is still waiting for that disruptive innovation to reshape it. Do we go for renting luxury, subscription boxes or wait to see if cheap 3D printing technologies mark a boom in crowdsourced fashion? Is your startup the next Uber for the fashion industry? Let’s see what you’ve got!
Hey Amazon, could you deliver my ring in 2 hours? 📦
We learn many new trends shaping the shopping experience: A new type of customers emerging, new ways of advertising, Augmented and virtual reality, 3D printing and wearable garments, big data enhancing the retail experience and digitalisation of the customer experience, subscription services, click & collect and many more. Most in-store IoT devices are used to create heat maps that can help the brands determine where their shoppers spend most of their time, enabling them to further refine the in-store experience. The customer experience service plays a critical role in fashion retail, therefore understanding better your buyer’s specifics needs and demands come first. For example, one of the latest apps I have been introduced to is GoFind, an AI-powered search engine for fashion garments. Take a pic via the app and the AI searches through 1000+ online stores, across 100 million items, in seconds.
Diamond your tech 💎
Here is a glimpse of history of wearable tech. We tend to see the wearable technology as fitness trackers, smartwatches, smart clothing or the so-called fashion tech, in fact, it is much more than that...
Smart Jewelry Reinvents The World’s Intimacy ⌚️
Looking at the future can be done from many different perspectives, of course. McKinsey has their point of view, I have mine. Well, simply put, this 700 billion $ industry is moving towards the tech industry. Like all other luxuries, it constantly needs improvements. The jewelry industry is a lot of things — interesting, creative, mysterious, complicated, tight-knit, old-fashioned. Nobody, however, would accuse it of being innovative or “ahead of the curve” when it comes to technology. Well, not until…
Healthcare: care to wear 💊
Do you think smart jewelry will transform the market for jewelry and accessories in the years to come? well many new devices have emerged thinking they can, like the Talsam (Talsam is a stylish charm that lets its wearer receive personalised notifications, unlock private messages, and send SOS alerts), Motiv (Motiv promises fitness tracking from the finger. It's very smartly built) and many more... Fitness trackers devices have proven to help daily health monitoring. Companies such as Jawbone, Fitbit, and Misfit have proven to be beautifully designed gathering a maximum data delivering great result.
Immersive gamification 🎮
AR and VR already transform the way we purchase goods, perform activities and sports, watch shows, communicate on social media and play video games. New types of entertainment and digital communications have emerged to improve day-to-day experiences. AR and VR leads to more screens, and more screens mean more places for marketers to advertise. Pokemon Go and Swarovski are great examples.
Look at yourself, you look beautiful with this ring
Imagine you pass by a window of a store. The ring that catches your eye is visualised by projection on your hand directly. Cool right? Well, this does not exist yet something close, VR/AR, does exist. It consists of visualising a model (take a ring for example) directly on your hand through your smartphone. How this helps you ask now?
Pure marketing purposes: Every advertising campaign using enlarged reality articles will convey first class encounters to clients, just as the more profound learning of the item. In this way, superior brand awareness. In adornments, it’s about introduction and showcases. With AR you can make features, constrained just by your dream and spending plan, showing gems things through the shopping glass alongside additional data (estimate, weight, 4Cs, and so forth.). Individuals just need to point their telephones/cell phones onto the features. Another utilisation is shop windows. Everyone gazes at shop windows and gets pulled in now and again. Intuitive store doorways grab individuals’ attention.
Enhancing customer experiences: The scheme “try before buy” is a great fit for online shopping if paired with AR. Selling jewelry is about invoking desire and need, and nothing drives it like trying on jewelry. Augmented reality apps offer a chance to do it virtually at home or anywhere else. Take “Say yes” as the main example for that.
Business efficiency: augmented reality boosts sales, that is evident. Apps are a common thing and AR attract interest, as simple as that. Purchases are just a few clicks away.
A conclusion as always 🥁
To innovate or not to innovate? This is a question you should as your team. You don’t necessarily have to re-invent the wheel per se, well not yet… You just have to be a little unique and ingenious on how you choose to stand out, as a brand.