Including fitting rooms equipped with touchscreens
Amazon Style is a new kind of physical store from the online shopping giant that will focus on clothing, footwear, and other fashion accessories, the company announced today. It’s due to open at The Americana at Brand shopping mall in Los Angeles later this year, where it will be Amazon’s “first-ever physical apparel store.”
In line with Amazon’s existing retail locations, the new Amazon Style store is packed to the gills with shopping tech. Amazon says clothes racks will feature QR codes, which customers can scan to see available sizes, colors, customer ratings, and product details. Then, with a tap of a button, selected items will be sent to a fitting room to try on without having to first rummage through racks. Amazon will also send additional items its algorithms think you might like. A promotional video shows how Amazon’s app will alert customers when a fitting room is ready.
The fitting rooms will also feature touchscreens of their own, so customers can request more items be brought to them. Items can either be purchased in store or saved to the Amazon Shopping app to buy at a later date. Alternatively, customers at home can use the app to find clothing they want, before having them delivered to the Amazon Style store to try on in person. The store will support Amazon One, a technology that lets you pay for items by using the palm of your hand for identity verification.
Conspicuously absent is any mention of Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology, which it’s previously used in its own Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores, as well as an increasing number of external stores, to allow customers to pick up items and walk out without needing to pay for them at a register.
Amazon says its new store is far more space-efficient, with Amazon Style able to offer “more than double the number of styles” as a traditional store of a similar size. But if it works, it also sounds like it could remove some of the pain points of in-store shopping, like having to awkwardly walk about a store half-clothed in search of a different size.
Although it appears to rely heavily on automation, Amazon says its new Style store will still have traditional employees, who will be focused on customer service, delivering items to fitting rooms, helping customers at checkout, managing back-of-house, and processing payments.
