‘Smart Mirrors’ Come to the Fitting Room

Since e-commerce began threatening stores last decade, retailers have been trying to make their locations operate more like the web. Yet despite splurging on the latest bells and whistles, they’ve mostly failed and fallen further behind their online rivals.

Recent efforts—such as QR codes, which call up merchandise information when scanned with a smartphone, and internet kiosks, where shoppers can browse a retailer’s online store—are either too far ahead of, or behind, shoppers technologically, so they haven’t been embraced, says Brendan Witcher, an expert on retail strategies at Forrester. Plus they do little to improve the actual shopping experience, he says. “If you just deliver tech for tech’s stake, people will test the novelty of it, but it won’t stick.”