Coronavirus: you will not try on your clothes like before!

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the image could give cold sweats to the most anxious among us. Imagine the customer of a clothing store taking full pants and a T-shirt, putting them on and taking them off, before repeating the same gestures in ten other stores. In the world that is taking shape, difficult to imagine. However, we will have to continue to dress… Will we have to buy these items in the future without knowing if they really suit us? Not necessarily, if we are to believe the specialists in artificial intelligence.

What will have to change are the changing rooms as we know them. To do without, companies have taken it into their heads in recent years to develop virtual alternatives. On its website, the British giant Asos thus created in January a panel of 16 mannequins of different sizes on which a client can test up to 800 products. Objective: help the visitor to visualize what the item of clothing she spotted would give her and reduce the number of order returns. A simple test, for the moment, tells us about the company.

For nearly ten years, applications have been widening this furrow of virtual fitting. If several of them have disappeared, Zeekit (developed by the Israeli company with which Asos created its virtual models) has had some success since brands like Adidas, H & M or Levi's have associated with it. The promise is simple: allow you to visualize your appearance with this or that item of clothing. To do this, just take your photo, and the application then creates an avatar in your image and with your measurements on which you can test the products of partner sites. If you like the rendering, you just have to pay the invoice on the site in question.

With Veertus, scan products in stores

So much for the web. But what about the “hard” stores, which still represented the majority of clothing purchases before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic? In France, the creators of an application think they have found a solution. Veertus, invented by a Grenoble start-up and available on the market for a year, is a "personalized assistant" who, facing a garment in a store, indicates without having to try it whether it suits you or not, by based on objective criteria.

The user must first create his profile on the application. "We are based on five elements that allow the algorithm to produce a typical silhouette," explains Jean-Marie Caoudal, co-creator of Veertus. Namely size, weight, age, shoulder width and bra size, to be as precise as possible. Once these parameters have been memorized, the customer goes to the store and scans the products they like. "A product sheet then appears on the smartphone screen with a well-going gauge oscillating between 0 and 100%", continues Jean-Marie Caoudal. The higher the percentage, the more the garment is adapted to the client's profile.

Galeries Lafayette was thus convinced by the usefulness of this innovation which references more than 50,000 products. "The pilot we launched in Grenoble is working very well," says the Parisian brand. In today's environment, virtual fittings are an interesting idea. According to our information, the application should be deployed after September in Paris stores of the brand. It is not the only one to look into this new technological solution: between the start of containment and the end of April, the number of stores to have joined Veertus had already jumped by 50%! Among them, Celio, Kaporal or the Beaumanoir group, which notably owns Bréal and Cache-Cache.

In this evolving landscape, not everyone abandons the traditional fitting room. On condition of modernizing it. In recent years, brands like Uniqlo, Nike and Carrefour have thus tested the connected mirror. The concept: a screen that reflects your image and superimposes on it, thanks to cameras and algorithms, the clothes of your choice. What is still only a gadget could be a solution for the future. Among the interested companies, Amazon, which filed a patent in 2018.

What about small stores?

The alternatives to classic fitting therefore exist, but they also have their limits. For the moment, no technology can equal reality and no virtual fitting gives a perfectly faithful idea of ​​the effect that a garment produces on you. Not to mention that no application or innovation is yet capable of giving you the sensation of a scratchy sweater or, conversely, of a satin dress.

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There is also the question of the adaptability of small signs. "This is a big issue for Veertus," says Jean-Marie Caoudal. In order for us to work with them, small stores must digitize their collections in order to make all of the digitized stocks available. An appeal heard by the National Apparel Federation, to which 32,800 stores in France adhere.

"The system consists in handing over a digital strategy check of 1,500 euros for VSEs with fewer than eleven employees," explains FNH president Éric Mertz. They can then choose a service provider with whom to draw up a digital development plan. Digital training will then be offered to managers. A plan very necessary, because 94% of establishments did not have any activity during confinement.

"According to our latest survey, less than eight out of ten establishments do not have a digital solution," said the president of the FNH. Within three years, we want to have at least 50% of stores equipped, compared to 22% today. The federation is studying in particular the possibility of integrating Veertus free of charge into the services of its members. A project postponed because of confinement, but which the health crisis has paradoxically made even more urgent. This should be done in September.