Trying on Shoes with Augmented Reality

Have you ever wanted to try on a pair of shoes and the store did not have your size? Or, are you like me and have larger than average feet and you have given up on stores having shoes in your size.

As someone who has had to order his shoes from 3rd grade onward, I 100% love this application.

Eastbay, Zappos, or more recently directly from the manufacturer, I haven’t been able to feel or see what a pair of shoes looks like on my feet before buying them since I was 9 years old.

This app does not help with the feel portion of that ordeal, but to see a pair of shoes on my feet would get me (and potentially others) further down the evaluation path.

THIS is a real business impact.

Another use of a simple digital tool in the shoe retail conversion funnel, is Zappos use of video to show the shoe on a model. The model walks with the shoes on, shoes how it bends, an in-depth look at the laces, everything that you would do if you were to try on the shoes, in real life.

For shoe manufacturers and/or retailers in a reality where free shipping and returns are the norm, tools that may slightly decrease the number of people that purchase a pair of shoes but increases the overall number of people that keep the shoes results in an increase to the bottom line.

At my previous employer, Life Fitness, there were several groups pushing to add AR/VR to our selling and marketing experiences. Working as a part of one of those groups, we explored how we could make something like this a reality. Adding fitness equipment to a space to show the customer what their space would look like with the equipment in a specific spot.

The program was aiming to help in the selling process, the imagining, the re-concepting of a space but was also aiming replace or augment the absolute need to layout the space. A real business impact.

We never got passed creating a tool to explore inspirational spaces but Wanna Kicks begs the question, is this enough of an experience to create a business? Or is one of the shoe manufacturers going to gobble up this tech and lump it into their app to aid their online sales. 

Is Wanna Kicks a Nike side project? Or a business to themselves? I am guessing you either see this on the Nike (or other manufacturer’s app) in less than 6 months.