Last month the leading Japanese fashion e-commerce site Zozotown introduced an amazing new innovation to the e-tailing of apparel products - a smart bodysuit called “Zozosuit”.
The purpose of the suit is to help customers accurately take their body measurements when buying clothes online, to ensure that they order sizes that will give them the ideal fit.
How does it work?
Zozosuit is an outfit that has stretch sensors that allows users to accurately measure their body. It is used in conjunction with the customers’ smartphone, so that body measurement data is transferred via Bluetooth from the outfit to the Zozotown mobile app:
Initially, the body measurements collected can be used when a Zozotown customer purchases an outfit of the company’s first private brand Zozo.
Zozotown’s parent company, Start Today, says the new technology is expected to help customers relieve concerns of buying the wrong sized clothes, and is planning to add more useful search and recommendation functions into the app.
The state-of-the-art technology was jointly developed by New Zealand startup StretchSense which Start Today invested in last year.
Zozotown is providing one unit of the product for free to customers, but charging 3,000 yen (about $27 US)for subsequent units.
The Japanese online fashion market leads the way...
The company has also been at the forfront of the development of innovative apps such as WEAR. Indeed the Japanese fashion market is at the forefront of converging technologies to give consumers a better online retailing experience.
So Zozosuit is just the latest example of how mobile and “smart” technologies are leading the way in the Japanese ecommerce market and are likely to roll-out into western markets in the not too distant future.
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