- Be Your Own Model is Walmart’s next step in personalizing the online clothing shopping experience.
- The retail giant acquired virtual trial platform Zeekit in 2021.
- Shoppers can upload a photo of themselves if they want to try on over 270,000 items available.
Walmart is offering consumers a more intimate online shopping experience through a virtual try-on facility that lets users see how clothes look on their bodies.
The new feature — which launched Thursday for iOS users on the Walmart app — comes after the retail giant acquired virtual room startup Zeekit in 2021. In March, Walmart debuted its “Pick My Model” technology , which allows customers to choose from 50 different size models to see how the clothes fit a body similar to their own.
Now in its next phase, ‘Be Your Model’, users can try on more than 270,000 items on their bodies – but they will first be asked to strip down to their underwear or skimpy clothing in order to function to work. accurately.
“This experience allows customers to use their photo to better visualize how the clothes will look on them, and creates a shopping game that we believe will be very compelling to the customer,” Denise Incandela, executive vice president of Walmart for clothing and private labels. , said in a statement.
More modest users still have options. In the Walmart app, users can decide whether they’d like to see clothes on a model of their choice or become the model themselves, according to an explainer video from the company.
Unlike previous technology that would overlay one photo on top of another for virtual try-ons, Walmart says Be Your Model uses algorithms and machine learning to simulate a more realistic fit.
“Walmart is the first to offer a virtual fitting experience for clothing brands at scale, and it’s the most realistic application I’ve seen,” said Incandela.
Walmart is the latest retailer to jump on the virtual try-on trend. In August, Amazon launched an augmented reality service that lets customers try on shoes virtually, and other retailers like Macy’s and Adidas have also previously worked with Zeekit to experiment with virtual reality.
