What’s the future of retail shopping? Snap bets on virtual try-on tech.
Marketplace Tech
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2023
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Snapchat made its name with silly augmented-reality filters, or lenses, as it calls them. In recent years, it’s expanded into shopping, enabling users to try on clothing, jewelry and makeup in the app. The company, now called Snap, has started selling this technology to other businesses. Snap announced this week that it’s pushing AR tools into the real world, bringing AR mirrors to some Men’s Wearhouse and Nike stores in the U.S. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino went to the company’s headquarters in Santa Monica, California, to try the tech out, and spoke with Carolina Arguelles Navas, Snap’s head of AR product strategy, and Brian Cavanaugh, director of project management and business development at Fishermen Labs.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Marketplace Morning Reports new Skin in the Game series explores what we can learn about |
| 0:04.6 | money and careers from the $300 billion video game industry. Plus, here how an Oakland-based |
| 0:11.0 | program helps young people get the skills they need to break into this booming industry. |
| 0:15.9 | Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning Report wherever you get your |
| 0:20.7 | podcasts. The app that brought us puppy ears and rainbow vomit is getting serious about augmented |
| 0:29.3 | reality. From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Carrino. |
| 0:44.4 | Snapchat made its name with silly AR filters or lenses as they call them. In recent years, |
| 0:51.5 | it's expanded into shopping, allowing users to try on clothing, jewelry, and makeup in the app. |
| 0:58.3 | Now, Snap is selling this technology to other businesses, and the company announced this week |
| 1:04.4 | it's pushing AR into the real world, bringing AR mirrors to some men's warehouse and Nike stores in |
| 1:11.1 | the US. Earlier this month, I went to the company's headquarters in Santa Monica to try to |
| 1:16.6 | check out myself. My name is Carolina Argoiaz Navas. I lead Snap's AR product strategy globally |
| 1:25.6 | across our other different product areas. Carolina says try-on technology has really caught on with |
| 1:32.4 | users. The idea of virtually trying on sunglasses and thinking, oh yeah, that makes sense. If I could |
| 1:39.6 | try it before I buy it all from home, it makes sense. We've actually already have over 250 |
| 1:46.1 | million people have virtually tried on products five billion times on Snap in the past year. |
| 1:52.8 | This isn't the future of shopping. It's technically not even the present because that was the past. |
| 1:58.3 | And so this is really about how does the future industry evolve to really start to incorporate |
| 2:05.2 | this type of technology because it's helpful for people. There are various different systems that |
| 2:11.9 | different retailers are using to do virtual try-on. I've seen Walmart has its own version where you |
| 2:19.3 | can create your own avatar or pick from a lineup of different models. There's mirrors enabled |
| 2:27.0 | with different kinds of visualizations. What makes augmented reality and the mobile context? |
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