Your move QVC

New York Fashion Week is still in full swing and Bloomingdales is getting plenty of attention with their approach. Last week I had the chance to walk Katie Linendoll of Talk Nerdy To Me through the store. She took to CNN last night and talked about Facecake’s Swivel as the future of shopping and said “your move QVC” – as she also did on her blog post on the topic.

As well as Swivel, Katie also mentioned another Kinect for Windows based project I spotted last week from German shoe retailer, Gortz. They’re using 3 Kinect sensors to scan customers feet and then allowing them to virtually try on any shoe in any size from Gortz’s online store. If customers like the look of a shoe a QR code leads them to a mobile checkout. Customers can also take a snap and share on Facebook of course. The app was premiered at Hamburg Central Station and I hear its rolling out to other stations.

 

The worlds of fashion and technology are clearly colliding and from what I see, things are really starting to get moving. One of the questions I was asked at last week’s Style Coalition panel is what role Microsoft plays in this area. While we’ve been involved in the retail industry for a long time with our business software such as Dynamics and POS systems running Windows Embedded, I responded that we’re also arriving more “front of house” now too.

The three key areas of involvement I talked about last week were our hardware products that are influenced by fashion, our platforms such as Kinect for Windows that companies such as Facecake and Gortz innovate on, and our research work that looks over the horizon at where the trend of wearable tech is going.

Expect more on this blog about this whole area over the coming weeks. 

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