Customers can personalise their own shoes in the shop
[On cover: 3D shopping experience by ELSE Corp.]
There is much hype about industry 4.0, and the final link (or the first, depending on where we decide to place the retail experience) of this process, which stretches from manufacturing to marketing and vice versa, is the shop itself. And it is there that the customer can enjoy a new shopping experience, thanks to the use of highly innovative technologies, such as augmented or virtual reality. It is the brainchild of ELSE Corp., the company offering a cloud-based Virtual Retail technology platform that is revolutionising the design, production, distribution and marketing methods and strategies of fashion products. The change is also affecting shops, which become conceptual spaces for visual merchandising where the customer can personalise their own shoes using the “mass customisation” process.
You can watch a demo of this process at the MICAM in just a few days’ time, where the ELSE stand will be offering a 3D virtual boutique, a virtual catalogue containing products that can also be bought virtually, a 3D configurator, a foot measurement scanner and some physical materials and accessories to actually make the shoe. The advantages of this technology, which draws on the support of Atom Lab for the Industry 4.0 production technologies aspect and Shoemaster International for the design technologies side (both companies belonging to Atom Group), is that it puts a stop to overproduction and stock problems, to create a smart supply chain using the technologies available to us today.
