Unique Solutions has been leading a revolution in personalized shopping since 1994. Originally founded to provide custom sewing patterns tailored to fit its customers’ individual measurements, the company has been on the cutting edge of 3-D body imaging and data capture for more than a decade. We hold the largest database of body measurements that reflect the true size and shape of today’s consumer.

Focusing on size and fit issues, as they affect individual consumers, the company has been steadily expanding its base of products and services so that people of all shapes and sizes could experience the comfort of products that truly fit their bodies.

In 2002, Unique Solutions introduced the proprietary UniqueScan body scanning system (now known as the Intellifit® Plus) using white light technology. In addition to over 200,000 points of body measurement, the Intellifit Plus can report BMI, height, weight, and health risk factors.

In 2009, Unique Solutions Design Ltd, acquired Pennsylvania based competitor, Intellifit Corporation. The Intellift body measurement system uses radio wave technology and is the only system capable of scanning a clothed body. We have applied our proprietary software and upgraded the technology and can now offer consumers the ability to quickly determine their exact body measurements and be matched to apparel that fits, without having to remove their clothing.

There is no sizing standard in the apparel industry, and guessing the right size has been a source of frustration for customers. Consumer research confirms that not knowing what size they need is the biggest barrier to internet apparel sales and for trying new brands. The Me-Ality shopping service will revolutionize both brick-and-mortar and online shopping by increasing sales and eliminating costly returns.

With the launch of Me-Ality in King of Prussia Mall – the largest retail shopping mall in the U.S. – Unique Solutions is utilizing body scanning technology to help consumers find their best fitting and most flattering styles from hundreds of brand name apparel lines.

As one of the largest resources for body/size/shape measurement data, Unique Solutions works with apparel and product manufacturers to develop size and fit solutions for their goods. We are changing the way clothes are sold – with a focus on fit, flatter, comfort, and performance.

Today, there is a seismic shift in consumer behavior affecting the retail world—and it’s being driven by technology. Likewise, retailers’ success hinges on an organizational ability to quickly adapt to, and actively integrate these new technologies as they infiltrate the marketplace. With brick-and-mortar retailers at risk of marginalization at the hands of “showrooming” consumers, or those who intend to purchase the merchandise for the best price online, there is no doubt that retailers feel the pressure to enhance their in-store experiences and keep the online sale in their own ecosystem. Here are some technology trends that retailers are adopting to engage the increasingly fickle customer:

• Using a customer’s data + location = great experiences

Even though sharing personal data like purchase history with retailers may feel intrusive to some consumers, it can enhance the shopping experience when used appropriately. For example, Neiman Marcus uses an app called NM Services, wherein a customer’s location data is utilized to have their preferences delivered directly to the Neiman Marcus sales staff. Once a user checks into the store, the staff can begin customizing recommendations for each customer and then efficiently guide these consumers toward appropriate products.

• A buyer’s market

It’s a buyer’s market, and smart retailers know it. Mobile app NetPlenish helps consumers create their “wish list,” and participating nearby retailers then compete with better offers than the current asking price.

• Using technology competes with online stores

With so many consumers’ price sensitivity and busy schedules driving them to shop online, retailers are becoming more adept at creating stunning real-life experiences to lure shoppers back into their stores. Kiehl’s and other retailers have started using technology from Perch, which is an interactive display technology that turns any light-colored table surface into a dynamic, hands-on interactive display.

Perch encourages customers to touch and pick up products on display and rewards them for doing so with information, animations and brand-specific media. It combines the informational benefits of online shopping with the advantages of retail shopping to create a unique and enticing experience for the customer.

• Bringing the retail experience online

Whereas brands previously reserved product testing for brick-and-mortar environments only, sunglasses brand Oakley recently created a service that shows you virtually how their sunglasses perform in various outdoor conditions such as skiing or hiking through the mountains.

• Technology that enhances the customer experience in-store

One of the greatest challenges for retailers is combating returns due to poor fit. To address the diverse shape and size of its customers, major retailers such as Bloomingdale’s and Eddie Bauer have partnered with Me-Ality to bring the company’s 3D sizing technology into daily retail operations. Located in malls across the country, Me-Ality’s Size-Matching Stations utilize the skin’s natural moisture to collect exact body measurements and provide specific size and style recommendations for clothing sold in-store.

Eddie Bauer has leveraged their partnership by offering an exclusive in-store discount on items recommended by the Me-Ality Size-Matching Station, while Me-Ality can now be found in several Bloomingdale’s locations, including 59th Street in New York City. The use of this technology has built a superior personalized shopping experience in-store and a confident shopper at the retailers’ e-commerce sites.

Moving forward, technological innovations will continue to have major impacts on the ways and means in which consumers shop. With the intersection of mobile, big data, and retail tech, we’ll see a drastic shift in how retailers help people shop. To see the Me-Ality’s Size-Matching Station in action at Bloomingdale’s, check out this recent segment on Good Morning America.

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Everyone wants to take advantage of the new marketing channel social media offers. The idea that we can drive sales to our storefront or website by being friendly, talking about ourselves, and engaging with our fans is an appealing and intoxicating one. We can offer some coupons, promote our specials and sales, and people will be flocking to our stores.Give us a “thumbs up” on our Facebook fan page, a friendly tweet on Twitter, a share of our blog post, and we are bound for social media success, right?

As it turns out, the answer is no.

You don’t have to spend much time on social media before you start to see the difference between a “like” on Facebook, for example, and an ultimate sale. The metrics can be tricky to track. The types of customers happy to like your page if you give them a free gift via a contest are not necessarily interested in actually buying your product. In the end, having more fans and followers does not guarantee increased sales. There is no magic wand.

What does help increase sales from your social media campaigns? The short answer is an integrated approach based on how your customers actually decide to buy.

The longer answer requires you to understand your processes, personify your value proposition fully, and interface with customers in ways that they appreciate and prefer. The work is hard but it’s worth doing.

The following suggestions will assist you in moving your social media efforts from just a curious pursuit to build brand awareness or push out coupons to a powerful and useful sales tool.

Integrate Your Offline and Online Efforts

When you run a Facebook campaign, weave in a physical in-store action as part of the transaction. For example, billboards should direct viewers to a website offer instead of just showing a sexy picture with a logo. You can require a QR code scan or digital picture share from within your store to be posted to social media for entries into contests. You can set up location based check-ins that allow visitors to tell their online friends that they’re at your store. Bridge the offline and online worlds to stimulate both in-store foot traffic and targeted and motivated web traffic.

Brand awareness isn’t enough anymore. You have to connect the dots between where a customer finds your original provocative message, all the way to the cash register, including the points in between. Do this by including both physical actions with online virtual ones.

Incorporate Calls to Action

One of the simplest ways to make your social media campaigns work is to ask for an action. Don’t let a single lead be wasted. Move beyond name and brand awareness to direct appeal marketing.

Be sure to direct the visitor to a relevant, tightly focused landing page based on the original promise, rather than dumping them into just the home page of your website. If a visitor follows a Facebook link to a place on your website that has nothing to do withthe element that attracted their attention in the first place, they will resent you for it. Avoid that. Be sure to keep the conversation going from your social media to your landing page, and to your order page.

Develop a Nurturance Cycle

Many people use the Internet to research long before they are ready to buy. They will reach out to interact with you prior to actually wanting to purchase. Being available and helpful during this education phase allows you the opportunity to impress, delight, and close them when the time is right.

If you develop a nurturance cycle that supports this investigative learning process, potential shoppers will begin to develop a loyalty. If they find what they need from you, they’re more likely to buy from you. Nurture your audience with permission-based text or email marketing, regular yet friendly follow-up, and consistent “touches” that check the progress of the customer toward a purchase. Pay attention and express a caring attitude.

Make it Easy to Share

Social media requires the ability for frictionless sharing. The more complicated it is for your customers to share their experience, share your specials, and share their opinions about your products, the less likely it is that they’ll share it. In social media, sharing is what it’s all about, so you have to make it easy.
How can you make your content and website more sharable? Add social media social icons to your shopping cart pages so a single click allows your customers to tell their friends about your product. Add “share this” buttons to your email campaigns. Add your Facebook signup and friends summary to your website. Add a strong call to action asking them to share and you’ll get more people talking about you and recommending you.

Track Your Results

Relying on anecdotal evidence is not sufficient to build a strong business case for social media.   Use tracking links when creating social media blurbs. Implement Google analytics on all your web pages. Start A/B or multivariate testing for headlines and offers so you can confirm what is working and what is not. Use the information to derive insights that can inform you on what to change – what worked and what didn’t. Do more of what works.

Results Take Effort

If all of this is too technical, hire technical support or a social media consultant. There are also numerous options to gain training if you insist on doing it all yourself. Move beyond simply seeking numbers in your social media audience to focused campaigns that allow you to channel your audience and craft unique messages for each segment. That way, you can go from just being “liked” to also hearing your cash register ring.

To learn more about how to optimize your marketing, go to Me-Ality.com.

Me-Ality Market Insights From Unique Solutions

Who isn’t turning over every rock these days looking for growth opportunities? Apparel brands, with their almost obsessive focus on style, cost and value, might actually be overlooking one of the most important factors in the purchase equation: Fit.

Me-Ality 3D body scanners, which will begin rolling out to 300 US shopping centers later this year, have already begun to revolutionize the way consumers shop for apparel. After a 10-second fully-dressed scan, shoppers receive a customized, personalized shopping guide matching them with the styles and sizes of partner brand products in the mall that will fit them and their budgets. For the consumer, it means more productive and rewarding shopping trips, increasing the likelihood they’ll come back. For retailers, it brings a new and loyal customer base to their stores, increased sales, and fewer returns.

But wait, there’s more: In the process of scanning hundreds of thousands of consumers, Me-Ality realized it was collecting invaluable consumer data that could be used to help brands do everything from enhance their product development process to launch new businesses.

Read on to find out how one company added an inch…and in the process, grew its customer base by double digits.

Searching for Growth

One way apparel retailers and manufacturers can enhance brand appeal is by taking a closer look at their consumers, and intensifying their focus on sizing and fit.
Too often, apparel shoppers are aware of the styles that appeal to their fashion senses but find challenges in identifying their exact fit. Likewise, apparel makers are constantly under pressure to forecast fashion trends with size and fit a main focus.

The tech-savvy software now available to retailers to help manage their inventory levels will be even more useful when coupled with powerful information on what could have been sold had the right sizes been in stock.

The Brand X Story

Sales at Brand X, an apparel company that prefers to remain anonymous, had hit a plateau, despite the fact that their pricing and styling were competitive. They went on a quest to identify other potential opportunities for growth.

Specifically, the product development team looked into ways to conduct a sizing survey to determine how they were fitting their core customer group – women between the ages of 18 and 25.

As a participating brand in the launch of the Me-Ality size matching service, they decided to explore if there was any way they could tap into some of the rich customer profiles Me-Ality was capturing with its scanning kiosks.

Me-Ality Market Insights

Me-Ality offers executives a level of consumer intelligence never before available. When Brand X management contacted the company, Me-Ality made them aware of its suite of aggregate data reports that deliver insights into body types based on a database of over 300,000 body scans. Me-Ality was able to segment the data for Brand X to focus on 20,000 profiles from the brand’s target customer base.  And by comparing those profiles with the measurements from their apparel, Me-Ality was able to generate reports, like the one shown below, that gave Brand X detailed assessments of their overall brand fit, and identified specific areas of opportunity to alter their designs to better meet the market’s profile.

Opportunity Found

One of the reports, which examined the target population within one market, revealed that across many sizing segments, the brand was doing a very good job of fitting its target population.  However, in 4 key size segments, there was significant lost opportunity.  For example, in a size 29 inch, XYZ was fitting 19 percent of the market in the female 18 to 25 year old age category. Utilizing Me-Ality’s data of body types from that particular age group, Brand X determined that it would fit an additional 12 percent of the market if it were to minimally increase the hip measurement of a 29 inch waist style by just one inch. If the brand were to modify its fit slightly in all 4 sizing categories, they would fit a larger percentage of the population and increase potential revenues significantly.

Subsequently, the brand modified its grading/pattern to recover a larger percentage of the market it had previously missed. By incorporating the one inch hip increase into their denim styles Brand X was able to directly increase revenue opportunities and provide an excellent fit to an average of almost 33% percent of their core consumer in the identified 4 size categories. This represents an over 10% potential sales increase in the selected categories.

Brand X management was so intrigued by the intelligence they garnered for missed sizing opportunities that they decided to tap Me-Ality for information pertaining to missed opportunity sizing at retail stores nationwide.