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What does the store of tomorrow look like for a fashion brand? SAP’s new experience center in New York City brings the future of retail to life.
The center provides tangible examples, including:
- Virtual fitting rooms
- Augmented reality displays
- AI-powered personal assistants
- Robotics
Experience center: Magic mirrors & personalized perfume
Shopping for clothes today can be a chore – consider all the hunting through racks to find the right size and color. But new technologies promise to make it easier.
With a brick-and-mortar retail layout, the experience center includes fitting rooms with “magic mirrors” that can help a customer see what different sizes and colors look like.
Another feature at the center provides a real-life example of retail personalization at its best. AI-based technology helps a shopper identify their unique fragrance attributes, then a micro-manufacturing facility mixes the custom fragrance while the customer waits.
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This is a powerful example of the future of retail, where brick-and-mortar brands use first-party data about a shopper to offer a bespoke experience that delivers a unique product unavailable elsewhere.
These kinds of personalized experiences and products are the future of physical retail.
Sustainable retail on display
Customers are increasingly concerned about the impact of their purchases on the planet, and they expect retailers to do their part in reducing the carbon footprint.
This is especially true for millennials and Gen Z shoppers. Studies have shown that younger generations seek out sustainable products, and expect brands to do more to protect the environment.
SAP’s S.Fashion Lab highlights sustainable products and practices, such as recycled materials, renewable energy, and waste reduction. Displays include Copenhagen Cartel swimwear made with recycled nylon fishing nets and clothing made from an eco-conscious fabric made from cotton and seaweed fibers.
Multi-purpose experience centers: The benefits
There are a number of reasons why technology companies like SAP creating experience centers is a good idea:
- Demonstrating the modernization of tech stacks
- Ability to see real-world results
- Actionable UX and CX feedback
First, as technology providers move away from monolithic on-premise technology stacks towards more cloud-based, headless services architectures, it’s more important than ever that they provide tangible examples of how all these components can work together to solve real business problems for clients.
Specification sheets and canned demonstrations will no longer suffice when the client plugs multiple systems together to achieve a unique business outcome.
Second, an experience center gives prospects and clients a chance to see real-world customer experience flows through rich storytelling that illustrates what’s possible and what the actual business value will be.
Finally, these centers give experience designers and technical architects a chance to see how humans interact with their experiences in the real world, which allows for a much faster and richer feedback loop, making the solutions better than would otherwise be possible.
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Future of retail: The wait is over
The opening of SAP’s S.Fashion Lab is an excellent example of how technology companies are evolving to help the retail industry realize its digital future.
By leveraging cutting-edge technology and innovative experiences, they provide customers with a unique and immersive shopping experience. In addition, experience centers provide a platform for technology companies to showcase their solutions tangibly while highlighting their commitment to sustainability.
As industry lines blur, we can expect SAP to open more experience centers across different sectors. Late last year, SAP opened its first redesigned experience center focused on the “smart supermarket” shopping experience.
The future of retail is here, and it looks exciting.
