“Really Cool and Fun”: Augmented Reality Mirror Trial a Hit

Last month, The Party People trialed an augmented reality mirror store for a unique customer interaction and checkout experience with plans to expand the system to encompass other types of retail.

The pop up took place at Macarthur Square, a Lendlease shopping centre in Campbelltown NSW, from the 9th October to 31st October for people to virtually try on, and shop Halloween costumes.

We spoke to The Party People founder and Chief Party Dude Dean Salakas to find out how the trial went and whats next for the project. 

How did the trial go and did you see much engagement from the public?

It went really well. We had heaps and heaps of engagement. People loved being their favourite characters. Kids as much as parents enjoyed playing with it.

We generated 20-40 sales per day and generation a huge amount of awareness for our The Party People store nearby as well as creating a local perception that we are the coolest and best party store.

We assessed the sales with direct transactions on the mirror being easily attributable (because the were in a separate checkout system) but also we tracked in store sales with a 10% discount coupon we gave each customer who used the mirror.

What feedback did you get?

The general feedback we got was that it was really cool and fun. I treated the local coffee shop as an office and worked from there most days. I could see the mirrors from there so watched interactions and would in some cases go up and ask customers a question but in general I could see enough to provide feedback to the technical team.

We rolled out five different deployments which reworked the customer experience in some cases split testing the results as we had two mirrors running. Each change we saw positive results both in the number of people using the mirror and the number of conversions.

What’s next?

The Party People is looking at how it can scale the concept next year.

We are also looking beyond costumes and into other industries. For example fashion for people to try things on, for toys where people can become their favourite character and purchase it or for sporting stadiums to allow people to transform into their sporting hero and buy the jersey.  We are currently in conversation with a number of fashion retailers.

The applications in the works involve a pop up store like we have done but also for applications like putting it on hoarding before a store opens so people can interact and purchase from the brand, putting in a shop window so people can window shop, or putting in store to relieve stress on change rooms.