Elanso

Remote clothes shopping in Japan uses personal avatars for styling and sizing.

A few weeks ago we featured a real fitting room that allows you to be connected virtual - Trend: Social Retailing - Talking Mirror. This Japanese find from our team in Tokyo showcases a different solution to virtually try-on clothing and accessories on your personal computer. one that allows Now Avielon Co. is debuting one, called Awaseba.

The product is being marketed to online retailers, who can then feature the Awaseba service on their sites. A one-year rental fee for the program costs ¥630,000 (about $6,000).

In exchange, the service is free for the online shoppers, who create an account with an email address and password login. First-time users simply upload a photo of themselves onto the Awaseba server that will function as their virtual self inside the virtual fitting room.

Luxy Coordinate Collection, a junior ladies fast fashion retail site, and Upsold.com, a general “design goods” online shop, have already signed on to make the service live in the near future.

Some online sites, like stylewalker.com have avatar components for their own sites that users can dress, experimenting with different outfit combinations.

A program like Awaseba, however, would not only allow users to use a real image of themselves, but also maintain only one profile image for multiple shops.

We can hope (and expect) that this will catch on soon!

For the original post and the latest Japanese trends please visit our CScout Japan blog.