This is the future of fashion retail: You’re in the changing room, wondering what your best friend would make of the knee-length red dress you’re trying on. You take a selfie with the iPad attached to the wall and it is instantly beamed to your Facebook page, where your friend can give you her trusted opinion. Meanwhile your partner is relaxing in the in-store bar area, checking out the menswear looks on the lounge tablets.
At Tommy Hilfiger’s flagship store in Dusseldorf, Germany, this is exactly the kind of experience customers can expect. Bouncepad’s wall mounted iPad kiosks have been installed in the dressing rooms, giving shoppers the opportunity to share their experience with the tap of a finger. Social sharing means that friends and family can give their views pre-purchase, and happy Tommy Hilfiger fans can tell the world about their purchases. Omnichannel retail has truly arrived.
“Bringing the digital brand into the store environment creates more touchpoints for the customer, increases dwell time, and makes for more engaged shoppers,” says Bas Bruijninckx, IT director of ecommerce and digital at Tommy Hilfiger parent company PVH.
“Installing Bouncepads has proved to be a great way of connecting our digital concepts with our physical retail space.”
Offering this feature is a fresh innovation to the changing room experience and engages customers with the Hilfiger brand in a meaningful way. It’s part of a growing trend for multichannel digital enhancement in luxury fashion retail. High profile events like New York Fashion Week are embracing social media such as Twitter and Instagram, with participants showing off selfies taken at exclusive events and videos of runway shows.
High-end brands are becoming ever more accessible through the use of such technology, and tablets are a big part of the picture. Providing interactive touch points in physical brand environments, tablets are able to bring the richness of a brand’s online content to the store through digital look books, buying guides and catwalk or craftsmanship videos.
Bringing the digital, online experience into the physical retail context is also being embraced in rest and entertainment areas of stores, with ‘man crèches’ becoming popular places to deposit shopping companions with less stamina. Populating these areas with enclosed tablets allows retailers to provide access to the web, games or branded content. The Bouncepad Lounge, as used at the Tommy Hilfiger flagship store, has a reinforced cable to allow flexible movement while remaining secure. Customers can relax in comfort while browsing the iPad just as they would at home on the sofa, hugely increasing in-store dwell time and allowing shopping companions to continue their retail experience without so much time pressure. It’s a win-win situation.