Zalando pilots virtual fitting room in 25 markets

European fashion e-tailer Zalando is rolling out its virtual fitting room pilot to customers in its 25 markets, including the UK, Ireland, France, Netherlands, and Germany.

The virtual fitting room experience is part of Zalando’s efforts to double down on size and fit and will allow customers to create a 3D avatar by entering their height, weight, and gender, which will then be able to show how jeans will fit them.

The pilot is available for a selected range of jeans from different brands, chosen as Zalando states it is one of the “most challenging categories in terms of finding the right size due to the lack of sizing standards”.

Customers will be able to use their digital avatar to see how different jeans sizes from various brands would fit them, with a heatmap indicating where the item sits tight or loose.

Stacia Carr, vice president of size and fit at Zalando, said in a statement: “Our goal with these pilot campaigns is to learn and understand how customers engage with this new technology so that we can develop a seamless scalable solution for the future. We already see that the customer engagement with those campaigns increases and, in fact, around half of the customers try more than one size on the avatar.

“We want to support the industry as it continues to adopt and leverage 3D digital design software and workflows to produce fashion. These processes generate digital assets necessary to scale a virtual try-on experience.”

This is the third pilot campaign from Zalando using this innovative technology. More than 30,000 customers have previously interacted with the virtual fitting room with selected items of clothing from Puma and Zalando’s private label Anna Field.

Zalando is the only European fashion e-commerce platform to have an in-house team dedicated to size and fit. The team uses a combination of fitting models and machine learning, computer vision and other technologies to predict if items run big or small. It has also created personalised size recommendations based on customers’ purchase and return history along with reference items customers can add to their size profile. For those items where Zalando provides size advice, size-related returns have decreased by 10 percent vs similar items where size advice is not provided.

In addition, the retailer’s size and fit team are working on a body measurement feature to offer customers personalised advice based on their actual measurements. This feature is expected to be rolled out in the coming months.