Clothing stores have long employed all kinds of sneaky behaviour to make you want buy their products. The store assistants tell you you look fantastic in everything, the changing mirrors make you look skinnier, they play music that encourages people to make more purchases. Then often when you get home, those trousers don’t look so good after all, and they stay at the back of your closet forever more.
Tommy Jeans, part of the Tommy Hilfiger brand, believe they can solve this part of the problem. Their new line, Tommy Jeans Xplore, will contain smart-chip technology that will track how often customers wear the clothes. Tommy Jeans will offer rewards and experiences, including gig tickets and gift certificates, to people that wear their clothes often enough (presumably some rewards will be even more wear-tracking items).
Tommy Jeans says that by tracking users’ clothes-wearing habits they will be creating a “micro-community of brand ambassadors”.
The collection includes hoodies, T-shirts, jeans and a denim skirt as well as bags, backpacks and hats. Every item is fitted with a bluetooth chip that can be linked to an Xplore app to start collecting “rewards”. As well as rewards for just wearing the clothes, bonus credits will be awarded for walking past special Tommy Jeans locations, which will be displayed on the app. So you could put the jacket on and then travel across town so that you can tell your jacket you’ve gone to where it told you to go.
Tommy Hilfiger representatives said that the data they receive will be encrypted and wearers will be able to turn off the chip’s functionality at any time using the app – so perhaps that will make people feel better about wearing a baseball cap that knows where it is.
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