Thank you so much – Joe for the wonderful intro, and providing us with a very useful framework;And Frank for inviting us to this amazing event…And all of you for being here to share our experience and perspective in mass customization.
As Joe has shown us with so many examples, the convenience and value of the experiences available via digital technology is just too compelling. So the winning products and services of the future will be those that can be made more available, more immediate, more compelling, and richer via digital technologies.
And so our point of view is that if something can go digital, it WILL go digital.Product that can be consumed in digital forms where leaders:Music…Books…Software….Computers….General hard goods are getting big, too.
But what about Apparel?How will “Digital” intersect with “Apparel” in the future? Can digital technologies help personalize the experience people have with Apparel, in an effective way?
And why would it matter?Well, in a recent global survey by Nielsen,27K shoppers around the world were asked about their online purchase INTENTIONS.Apparel came upsecond highest on the desired list* - right after books.
Whileapparel related traffic in the online medium is high, online apparel sales as % of total lags far behind other categories of goods.Websites selling clothing online providie inspiring photographic images,But while visually compelling, not very personal for most consumers.
While sites do a good job of inspiration using beautiful merchandising shots, suspicions abound… <click>In our research, 2 out of 3 online shoppers said concerns about look and/or fit deters them from buying clothes online.
And:liberalreturns don’t fully solve the problem either. Returns reduce profitability for retailers, and leave buyers often disappointed and frustrated.These issues are amplified in categories like pants and shirts, where look and fit are especially difficult.
And for customizedgarments – things are even worse.<click> (pause and move on)
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And this is what embodee does…Our Goals are» Make it easy for a brand or retailer to support a large assortment of apparel products for customization» Enable Seamless experience across platforms (mobile)» Support even the most sophisticated customizable garment» Deliver it all with highly realistic garment imagery…. » and, finally enable the try-on on any body, via a fast, accurate, and virtual Try-On, also on a broad assortment.
So to pursue these goals,we needed to bring together talents from technology, interactive user design, and visual entertainment expertise.
And now applying these techniques to mass produced and mass customizable merchandise.How’s it work?Even for custom garment, we need to start with an accurate base garment which the user customizes or configures.
The product gets scanned and then processed by embodee proprietary systems, which we’ve developed. What you see here is the digital version of the garment taking shape…
And here’s an image of the final output – this is what an embodee digital garment looks like once it’s been through the digitization process. Notice how…yadeyada
Here’s a shot of the physical compute infrastructure that supports the embodee digital garment production, and also delivers the digital garment experiences.
Here’s another digital rendering of embodee’d garments – as you can see, the process works for most types of garments.Most importantly, these digital garments are dimensionally and visually faithful to the real-world version, enabling a host of applications.Let’s look at two leading ones.
Let’s head over to Joe’s “Physical Virtuality” – a digital space where products are designed virtually, only to have them be made and delivered in Reality.<Click to run animation>Lets look at some of the best examples out there, sites that offer product personalization online.
What you see here are some market leading examples of product personalization available online.All of them have a common need: they depict what the personalized product will look like. Making this happen is not easy; even with the aid of current technologies it is laborious and expensive to put a customizable product out there. With apparel there are additional challenges because the shape of garment varies, and because apparel ideally needs to be visualized from many angles in order to get a real sense of what it looks like.
So let’s take a look at what some of the technologies that support & enable current levels of customization are.This chart is a view of how different personalization technologies map out. The companies toward the right are the ones with the most “capabilities” facilitating personalization experiences.An on the vertical we plotted easy of use – i.e. how easy it it to introduce the technology into one’s online presence – not just a bonus, but a requirement for most companies out there today. There is certainly room for different point of views on the relative positioning – and our intent here is not to establish absolute positions. And of course technology evolves so a picture like this always changes. <Click>But the point we hope is that we all share the goal of moving toward the upper right, and it is these axis that have guided our work. Let me give you two leading examples – the first from Product Personalization, and the second from Personal product experience facilitation.
Some time ago, <1st Click>Nike, one of the acknowledged leaders in product customization, decided to seek a big leap in capability for customization of not only shoes, but also apparel.<2nd Click>Nike askedRGA, their lead designer of interactive experiences, <3rd Click> and embodee to work with them to deploy a ground up new approach for Nike’s Team Sports business.
The service we’ve developed it’s operations in earnest in June of this. It powers the this site, which you can see at niketeam.nike.com. It’s primary audience is dealers, coaches, and players – but you can visit it for yourself if you’d like. If you are involved with team sports, you can design a uniform yourself and request bids for the custom design for your team directly from Nike’s dealers.
<Click> - starts uniform samples running across screen.Here you see a stream of personalized uniforms. This past quarter alone, embodeeservers have been rendering 100reds of thousands.
So let’s head over to Joe’s Virtuality.<click in presentation mode to run animation).Here, the embodee facilitates….
personalized experiences of Standard Product,Via a Virtual Try-on – a digital experience that matches the real world experience.
Doing this is also a capability of the embodee platform. We’ve deployed the system for the first time with Hurley, a Lifestyle brand that is building product breadth and makes some really nice pants for a younger demographic (mostly). But as you might notice, I’m wearing a pair of Hurley’s today, and I “got into them” using the embodee system. <Click> Let me share with you how this is possible, and how anyone can have this now.
Consumers say that trying to find that perfect pant in the sea of choices takes too much time.The virtual try-on can be useful in-store, because even in store product choice can be overwhelming. When we got close to completing the first version of the system, we piloted the system with Hurley in a nearby store.
We had shoppers virtually try-on their favorite pant candidates. Once they selected a style, they received that pant in the size the system found for them. They would take only that one to the dressing room. Close to 80% found a perfect fit on the first try, 98% on their second try.
1st click:As of this week, Hurley around 500 pant skus are live at shop.hurley.comIf you look carefully in the upper right hand corner, we offer online users a “2 click” option to send us their satisfaction score, and a scale of 0-5. 2nd click: Last holiday season, we hit a cumulative 4.8/5.0.
Some users are generous enough to take the time to not only give us a “quick” score, but to share write-in feedback.Here’s a typical sampling….
But most exciting of all is to see the actual business parameters reflect the consumer satisfaction.In a year of record sales for hurley, they have achieved a 33% reduction in returnsin the category of product supported by embodee. Hurley shared with us that they have never seen a comparable impact on return before.Ultimately though, the judge of the try-on system’s value is folks like you. So if you’d like, visit shop.hurley.com and send us your feedback via that little triangle in the upper right hand corner!
So as with any new technology or product, embodee will go through a new product adoption cycle as popularized by Geoffrey Moore.As you saw, these new digital experiences are now being delivered by our early adopters. In the past quarter we’ve streamed over a million of personalized views, and so we think we may have just crossed the chasm with a heavy dose of “I think I can, I think I can”, and like mass customization in general, we are ready for Ashton Kutcher to bring on the early majority.
Things won’t sit still, of course. As we move forward, we look forward to building this to further traction, and to scale.We are also planning to add further capabilities… and so…
…let me ask George Borshukov, our CTO and engineering leader behind much of what you’ve seen today, to join me on stage. George will show you a glimpse of what happens when you integrate the capabilities of customization and try-on, and then offer you a chance to get involved.<On stage demo of iPAD app commences.>(At the end, George shows them how to submit their size & name, and enter the give-away for a chance to receive a t-shirt.)