| | |  Technology News | October 2008 
3D Fitting Room Makes Mexican Debut
 Ninoska Marcano M. - Miami Herald
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| | A futuristic fitting room using a 3D body scanner will provide exact measurements to fully-clothed shoppers at a Mexican department store. | | |
Mexico City - Mexico will soon become the only country in Latin America to enjoy the luxury of having a virtual fitting room.
While world financial markets are tumbling, and fear grows worldwide that consumer spending power will lessen, Mexico's Liverpool department store - one of the country's largest - believes that investing in new technologies will result in more sales.
The good news for Mexicans is that no one will need to be a fashionista, a top model, or a beauty pageant wanna-be to enjoy purchasing custom-made clothing.
The 3D body scanner, which is inside a circular glass cabin, will provide exact measurements to fully-clothed Liverpool customers. The free service takes about 40 seconds and offers a print-out of individual sizes of some of Liverpool's top brand name clothes. The sophisticated computerized equipment, which costs about $150,000 a unit, will be officially available to the public on Nov. 5 at the Liverpool Insurgentes department store in Mexico City. Liverpool owns 69 stores nationwide.
Intellifit, a Pennsylvania-based corporation, is the company behind the technology. Since 2000, it has tackled the international markets of custom-made design clothing and jeans.
Intellifit's main client is Levi Strauss & Co., but it also does business with Charming Shoppes, which operates 2,300 stores under the brands of Lane Bryant, Fashion Bug/Fashion Bug Plus, and Catherine's stores in the United States. The scanner machine was tested at a Miami Beach store in 2005.
"This is our first time in Latin America - and we are excited about the outcome in Mexico," said Rob Weber, Intellifit's chief executive officer.
With the scanner, Liverpool claims to have temporarily outsmarted its competitors. "Although the Insurgentes store is our pilot project with this new technology, we are hoping to increase the overall volume of sales, as well as our sales by phone and Internet," said Alejandra Tovar, Liverpool's special sales manager. "Here in Mexico, Mother's Day and Christmas are our biggest sales days, and sometimes conventional fitting rooms are not enough to cover the demand, so with this new technology, we hope to improve, facilitate, and make the shopping experience faster for our customers," Tovar said. "We are not trying to make the conventional fitting room obsolete, but to be able to tell customers what fits best," said Patrick Carballo, Intellifit's project manager in Mexico.
Tovar said Liverpool's goal is to input a total of 250 brand names into the scanner's memory, so shoppers will be part of Liverpool's database and can have all of the brands available in the store in their exact sizes.
"This machine is very fast," Marta Millán, 80, after a recent test run at the store. "This technology is great. I will definitely come back and try it again."
The Intellifit representative said the machine is harmless since it operates with the same technology as cellphones and radio waves. After the machine scans the body, it creates a 3D image that will only be seen by the technician.
"People don't have to worry about undressing or getting naked," Carballo said. "We won't even have a naked image of the customers because the image is blurry." |
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