Ralph Lauren’s Future Plans Include a Store With No Clothes

Newsflash: Brick and mortar shopping isn’t dead. It may not be growing as fast as online shopping, but it’s sticking around for the foreseeable, thanks to some creative new approaches.

Case in point, American fashion designer Ralph Laren’s plans for the merchandise-less store.

It sounds unconventional, but the brand’s chief innovation officer David Lauren is excited about the possibilities of a brick and mortar store with no merchandise in it.

Ralph Lauren’s Future Plans

Instead of perusing rows of polos and sweaters, customers will tell an in-store expert what they want—within the restrictions of styles and fabrics—and the brand will make it for you. On-demand clothing, if you will.

The son of founder Ralph Lauren, David has been at the forefront of many of the brand’s technological leaps and now he’s leading the charge into Create Your Own.

The brand is trialling the concept online, letting customers mix and match colours to create personalised jackets and polos. And Lauren believes the brand isn't too far from making all its garments on demand.

Ralph Lauren first started offering customisation more than two decades ago, when the brand let customers add monograms and patches to pieces, but now that that’s become commonplace, Lauren is ready to kick it up a notch.

Ralph Lauren's Vision With Personalised Clothing

“We started with our icon, the polo shirt. It’s our version of the Levi’s 501 or the Nike Air Jordan,” he told Fast Company earlier this month. “We’ve started with a limited set of colour combinations, to introduce the customer to the concept and not overwhelm them. You can change the colour of the collar or the sleeve. You can emblazon words on it. But over the next year, we’re going to flex up to millions of combinations, down to picking the colour and design of each button.

“But this is really just the beginning. This custom polo represents the future of Ralph Lauren. Imagine going to a store where [there aren’t] products, but you say, ‘I would like an orange polo shirt please.’ We will help you design that shirt—or you could do it online—and we’ll make that one shirt for you in your size.”

As well as giving customers an experience that’s “really fun, theatrical, and exciting”, Lauren points to the environmental benefits of custom manufacturing—an important topic in the industry that creates the most waste in the world.

“The bigger idea here is not personalisation or customisation: it’s on-demand manufacturing. It means there is no waste. We’re not just creating a bunch of orange shirts and hoping they all sell. We’re just creating that one orange shirt for you.

“This is actually a much more sustainable approach to fashion and we know the customer is very concerned about sustainability. Take that stack of orange shirts in the store. In a good season, we sell between 50 per cent and 70 per cent of them, then the rest of the product is marked down. You might put it back on a truck to ship somewhere else. Eventually, products that just don’t sell will be discarded.

“With [on demand], the customer knows there’s no waste. And for us, as a brand, we aren’t selling products cheaply just to get them off our shelves. We’re not diluting the brand with sales.”

How Will The Idea of On-Demand Clothing Work?

The one downside to on-demand clothing is that it’s not instant. Currently, the brand’s custom polo shirts are made on the west coast of the US, so customers receive them about two weeks after they order, but the long term plan is to manufacture the products as close to the customer as possible. This means that, as well as getting orders delivered faster, the brand is also reducing the environmental costs of shipping and distribution.

The focus for these empty Ralph Lauren retail stores will be the experience, and the brand is working hard to develop that.

“It has got to be fun,” added Lauren.

“My ultimate goal is for people to come here with a vision in their head and be able to create whatever they want. If you want tie-dye or stripes on your garment, we’ll do that for you. If there’s any colour you can dream of, we want you to be able to make it in your colour.”

Other Ralph Lauren Endeavours

The brand is no stranger to out-of-the-box thinking. In 2015, its flagship store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan installed “connected fitting rooms” that blended digital shopping technology with that of the more traditional in-store retail experience.

Installed by retail tech leaders Oak Labs, these fitting rooms include smart mirrors that help customers make decisions and place orders seamlessly. The fitting rooms’ smart mirrors use RFID technology to recognise which pieces a customer has brought in with them and helps by offering more information and options about them, such as alternative colours and sizes, and complementary products.

The mirrors also give you the option to adjust the lights (just what you need for end-of-winter swimsuit shopping) and have the whole system run in a language you’re more comfortable in. There’s also a button to call a salesperson to your cubicle, saving you that awkward shoeless trot out to the shop floor.

Since the installation of the smart mirrors, Ralph Lauren has reported an engagement rate of 90 per cent, which is significantly more than the company had expected.

In fact, a report the following year into luxury stores in New York City, Digital and Physical Integration: Luxury Retail’s Holy Grail, found that Ralph Lauren was the retailer that had used technology in their physical retail space more effectively than any other.

“Consumers are outpacing the ability of retail,” said Oak Labs CEO Healey Cypher at the time. “They expect everything to be faster and easier, but when they step into the store, things haven’t actually changed that much.”

Cypher is intrigued by the possibilities that come with digitising the in-store experience, not only for the shopper but also for the retailer, especially in terms of data collection.

“It’s a misconception that online collects data better than physical retail,” said Cypher. “When you can collect data from the physical world, that’s impactful.”

“We know which items are being tried on but not purchased,” said Cypher. “I can tell Ralph Lauren, here’s a jacket that goes into the fitting room frequently but has less conversion than other jackets. The merch team should look at this—maybe the fit isn’t right but the aesthetic is. Data like that can fundamentally change how retailers run their business.”

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