Imagine being able to walk through the living room you’ve designed without having to buy all the furniture first, how would this impact your purchasing? Would you change the cream couch to drill grey? Repaint the walls before putting the furniture in?
Well at Macy’s, now you can.
The Market @ Macy’s allows consumers to view products from 150 e-commerce brands that rent a pop-up style space from the department store. These brands will market new products, demo services and offer unique experiences currently unavailable. Facebook, unsurprisingly, is in partnership with Macy’s on this venture. Promoting the use of its platform for marketing small businesses.
Macy’s new pop-up venture – The Market @ Macy’s
As part of The Market @ Macy’s, they have partnered with Marxent- a top visual reality company that specialises in VR. The use of VR technology for furniture is initially being rolled out in 69 stores within the United States by November. From the first round of data released, the quantity of returns has reduced to less than 2% of total sales.
New VR capability in Macy’s store
This comes from consumers being able to see how the product would look in different positions and when surrounded by other pieces to create a cohesive space. Furthermore, keeping large amounts of furniture on shop floors is not financially beneficial- as most people do not buy shop samples and prefer having new ones ordered in for them. However, by using VR, sales assistants are able to showcase more products to buyers without having to have the couch, chair or lounge set physically in store.
In addition, the company offers a “Visualize Your Space” experience on its app. Allowing customers to take photos of empty spaces in their home and add furniture from Macy’s to the screen. Being able to evaluate how a new piece would look amongst the current furniture without needing to go in store to see the offering or buy it to see how it looks in the home.
Macy’s are changing the way we shop for products and the way we perceive department stores. Stores such as Myer and David Jones are struggling in Australia, closing down many locations due to a lack of revenue being generated. Perhaps these companies need to use these international stores as an example of innovation in order to survive in the Australian market.
I know this one was a little less controversial, but I hope you learnt something.
Until next time
-Lawra
Modern Marketing 
What an interesting topic Lawra! I feel like this would be a great way to help consumers when purchasing products. I am yet to have the experience of needing to fully furnish a room, but I can imagine that it would be hard to picture the size of a room and how furniture would fit in. This is a great feature that could help eliminate the issue of people purchasing the wrong items and needing to return them. I would be intrigued to see if David Jones and Myer would try to incorporate this into their companies in order to jump back into the race in terms of revenue and competition.
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Sophie! Thank you for the comment, I completely agree that it will be interesting to see how Australian companies use this technology. I think the use of VR can really help in this instance
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I think the use of VR would be so cool in purchasing furniture, it would really be helpful in visualising the space in a virtual reality and would probably make it more fun too. Technology has come such a long way and it’d be interesting to see if such stores like David Jones and Myer or even Ikea would adopt this in the future!
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Thanks for the comment Juliana! I agree that its a great asset to companies, and it will be interesting to see how it evolves to meet more needs of the market
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Hi Lawra! Fantastic post! WOW I consider myself a home decor junkie and this seems like a dream come true! I would love to be able to one day experience something like this in David Jones or Myers. However, I think Melbourne department stores are still a very long way from the capabilities of stores such as Macy’s, Nordstrom or Selfridges. Perhaps, Myer and David Jones can start of with baby steps, such as introducing a small interactive pop up store? As excited as I am to see such technological changes in stores, I just don’t think I’ll see it in my local DJs for another 5 years – that’s IF it manages to even stay in business by that time!
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I think Australian department stores won’t be around much longer unfortunately. Hopefully companies like Ikea take this technology and use it to benefit customers. Thank you so much for the comment, glad you enjoyed it!!
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Hey Lawra! I love this idea!!! It’s such a great way for home renovators/builders to visualise their rooms as I know there’s nothing worse than buying furniture that looked way better in the store than what it does in your home! It’s crazy to see what technology is doing right now, and I’d really love to see it happening in Melbourne sometime soon !!
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Thank you for the comment! I totally agree with you, and think it will also reduce regret post purchase and you can see it in the space. Hopefully it comes to Melbourne soon!!
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Hi Lawra !
Thank you for this well written article – very interesting! Quite some luxury boutiques have started using VR options in their flagships stores. Not only does it attract younger consumers, but also does it increase the desire of customers to purchase these products as they see them on themselves
Cheers !
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Thanks for the comment Emma, glad you enjoyed it!! I hope more companies begin to use this technology, as it’s both innovative and just pretty cool.
Thanks so much xx
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Hey Lawra, I think VR will be a big thing in the coming future! It’ll certainly enhance the customer’s in – store experience, and attract more of the passing crowd into the store because of its creative and fun aspect. Also it will be valuable to stores to add to their creative, competitive edge, which would effectively raise awareness of the products and what the store has to offer. Great post 🙂
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Hey Lawra great read. It is very interesting to see how Facebook have been using VR after their seemingly strange acquisition of Oculus but this seems like a great idea. Carrying furniture around is always very annoying so i would love to give this a try when it becomes avaliable here.
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