It’s hard to tell where Michael Hauser’s love for denim ends and where his love of technology begins. The 25-year-old Dutch entrepreneur was just 20 years old when he opened House of Blue Jeans, a 100-square-meter (1,080-square-foot) clothing shop in Zoetermeer, a small city east of The Hague. He initially launched his business as an online store, Hauser says, and when he opened the brick-and-mortar version, he was eager to find ways in which using technology could make running the physical shop efficient but also more appealing to his customers.
Hauser sells men’s casual apparel with a focus (as the store name implies) on denim. This year, Hauser started accepting payments using DigiByte, a type of digital crypto-currency similar to Bitcoin. That is when he was contacted by one of DigiByte’s investors: Tofugear, a Hong Kong-based startup that develops in-store displays that integrate a retailer’s inventory, loyalty program, social-media campaign and payment interface onto a single platform.
Hauser’s interest in the Internet of Things was planted when he bought a Zebra Technologies RFID label printer-encoder so that he could create an RFID tag for each item and manually attach it to that clothing’s hangtag while entering it into his store’s inventory. “It used to take all day to count inventory,” Hauser says. “Now it takes five minutes.” He uses a handheld reader to interrogate the RFID tags, made by Smartrac, on the clothes on the sale floor, as well as those in stock.
By the end of this past summer, Hauser had worked with Tofugear to marry his RFID system with the startup’s point-of-sale, smart-mirror and customer-service platform, as well as a smartphone application available for either iOS or Android phones.
“I’m always interested in new technology, and I want to stay focused on the future,” the digital native says.
Upon entering the store, shoppers find paper flyers and a poster apprising them that a House of Blue Jeans smartphone app is available. They are offered a 5 percent discount at checkout, Hauser says, merely for downloading the app while inside the building.
“We want consumers to be able to consume the data associated with the RIFD tags,” Hauser says.
“So if they use the app, they move around a store and can see promotions. If the customers have expressed interest in a certain product in the past, the app will alert them when they approach it.”
This is enabled through Tofugear’s Omnitech platform, according to Andrew Leciejewski, a Tofugear managing partner. The company sells Omnitech as a software-as-a-service subscription. A retailer must also purchase whatever hardware—such as a smart mirror, RFID readers and Bluetooth beacons—it needs to support the applications it wants to offer customers.
Tofugear can customize touch-screen mirrors for use inside fitting rooms or on the sales floor, Leciejewski says, based on a retailer’s needs and its store’s physical layout. Due to the compact size of its fitting rooms, House of Blue Jeans opted to place one full-length touch screen mirror on the sales floor. An RFID reader integrated into a small counter next to the mirror interrogates the RFID tags attached to any clothing items a shopper holds up in front of it, and the system suggests other items to consider, based on the available stock and the style of the garments. If the customer also has the store’s app running on his phone, the beacon integrated into the mirror will pull up his profile and the messaging on the mirror might also suggest items that complement past purchases.
Tofugear used readers from Convergence Systems Limited and Bluetooth beacons from Kontakt.io for the House of Blue Jeans deployment, says Leciejewski.
The customer can also use a camera integrated into the mirror to take photographs of himself, alone or alongside friends with whom he is shopping, and post those pictures to social-media networks.
Mounted inside each fitting room are an Apple iPad and an RFID reader, which collects the unique identifiers encoded to all apparel items that the shopper has brought into the room. These garments appear on the iPad screen, and the shopper can quickly move some or all of them into a digital shopping cart and purchase them while still inside the fitting room, simply by paying via DigiByte or an electronic wallet app. Once the transaction is completed, the sales clerk receives a message on his or her smartphone and checks the selected items against the shopper’s receipt before that individual leaves the store.
If the shopper wants to purchase items at the sales counter, he can place them on the counter and an RFID reader integrated into the surface will read the RFID tags attached to the merchandise. The salesperson can then check that the list matches the items placed on the counter and complete the transaction.
Additionally, while inside the fitting room, the shopper can use the iPad to send a message to the store’s staff, who will receive that message on their smartphones. The customer can type out a specific request—to bring an item in a different size or color, for instance—or simply ask for assistance.
Hauser says his customers’ reactions to the Tofugear-enabled technology in the store have been positive. After two months, 150 shoppers had downloaded the iOS version of the app. The Android version, which has only been available for one month, has been downloaded 50 times.
According to Hauser, the smart mirror has generated a fair amount of buzz inside the store. “It’s just about 5 meters from the entrance,” he says, “so customers tend to immediately start asking what it is and how it works.”
It’s difficult to predict how many people who visit the store will be converted into loyal customers based on the technology alone, but Hauser feels confident that it is having an impact on the next generation of shoppers. “A 12-year-old came in recently with his mom after reading a story in a local newspaper about the technology we’re using,” he recalls. “The mom told me her son never used to like buying clothes, but now he’s excited about the store, and he was running to the mirror” with various pieces of apparel.
Editor’s note: This story has been modified to correct the chronological sequence of events in the store’s IoT deployment.