In November, Weekday (H&M Group) kicked off its innovative new design concept, Body Scan Jeans; Custom Made & Produced on Demand, at its Götgatan store in central Stockholm..
Customers walk into a stall that feels like a traditional “fitting room” but actually has our Scanatic™ 360 Body Scanner embedded inside it.
After a 3-second body scan, they can customize the details of their jeans (waist, fit, wash, and stitch color) on a large touch screen at Weekday’s in-store kiosk.
A few weeks later, they return to the store to pick up a pair of their made-to-measure jeans, in Weekday’s words, “as if [they] were woven around the actual body.”
So far, Swedish shoppers are very satisfied with the fit of Weekday’s Body Scan FIt Jeans. At Forbes, Brooke Roberts-Islam reports that none of the first 30 orders was returned.
(By contrast, with conventional mass-produced jeans, e-commerce return rates “can be up to 40%,” according to our partner Walden Lam, cofounder of Unspun.)
How does Weekday produce jeans that fit so well? Lam explained to Adele Peters at Fast Company:
“Once you have done the body scan, an avatar is generated. Essentially, we create a three-dimensional piece of garment in the virtual world, create the seam lines, and then have the pattern pieces cut out [at factories]. And then we send the pieces to assembly manufacturers to create them on demand.”
If the Body Scan Jeans concept continues to succeed, that would mean that the future of fashion is going to be different—that in the fashion industry of the future, consumers will look for made-to-measure apparel, produced on demand, even from large brands that have never before offered it. Amazon’s recent launch of Made for You T-shirts suggests that it, too, is betting on such a future.