The Living Room is the New Dressing Room

“The living room is the new dressing room.” - Miki Berardelli, Kidbox CEO (podcast)

I heard this shortly after telling someone that home is a shopping channel. If a fashion retailer doesn’t have a home strategy, it may be multichannel but I don't think I can say it’s omnichannel.

Realizing that the living room is the new dressing room can mean a number of things:

Giving guidance - How is a shopper getting the styling advice from you she’d get in a dressing room? Stitchfix includes suggestions in its box, but where’s the non-subscription retailer providing e-commerce’s famous “you-might-also-like” recommendations once the product arrives in the living room?

Providing interaction - Sure, some retail associates leave you in a dressing room and never check back in. But many others are helpful and facilitate an iterative process of swapping items and getting complementary pieces. I recommend offering an in-home chat option to accompany the unboxing.

Making returns easy - In a store, the customer is leaving what she doesn’t want in the actual dressing room. When the living room is the dressing room, options ranging from a shipping label and self-sealing packaging to physical drop-off points are better than the alternative of having to e-mail for a return authorization and print a label.

Letting it be fun - In many stores, the dressing room interaction leaves much to be desired. But for categories (bridal is one) where try-ons are meant to be special, I’d love to see the full experience “in a box”.

More to come on how home as a shopping channel relates to non-fashion categories.