Sustainable Mass-Customisation Business Model by Incorporating Virtual Fitting Room Marketing Tools in Fashion E-Commerce: A Study of the Luxury Unstitched Market

This chapter is centred around the luxury unstitched apparel market of Pakistan and interactive virtual fitting room tools of fashion e-commerce such as 3D mobile app scanners, virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality. Interactive virtual fitting room tools have been developed extensively for the advantage of both consumers and fashion retailers to improve online shopping experience (Idrees et al., International Journal of Economics and Management Engineering 14:318–333, 2020b). Thus, the chapter discusses the Pakistani luxury unstitched apparel market (Faust & Carrier, Textile Research Journal 79:1446–1458, 2009), for the enhancement of Pakistani fashion e-commerce interfaces by utilising interactive virtual fitting room tools. The discussion of luxury unstitched apparel products demonstrates that the products are loved across the borders because of their garment customisation, talent, and craftsmanship, and this demand is flourishing and expanding rapidly due to exquisite quality and design uniqueness (Rehman, A cross-border fashion jaunt, 2014). Unstitched apparel products are sold in separate garment pieces normally declared as 2-piece and 3-piece suits. For instance, the upper garment includes separate fabric pieces or one full piece of fabric offering the front, back, and sleeves along with separate one piece of fabric for the lower garment, which is adorned with various options such as printed and embroidered fabric pieces. Nevertheless, Pakistani fashion e-commerce platforms lacks= the web 3.0 technology virtual fitting room tools. Therefore, there is a need to incorporate virtual size and fit prediction, customisation, and virtual fashion viewing interactive tools. The virtual fitting room tools discussed in the chapter provide customisation approaches along with size recommendations and virtual trying on with 3D product visualisation (in 360-degree rotation), which generate beneficial competition amongst online retailers. The Lemon and Verhoef (Journal of Marketing 80:69, 2016) model is employed to present a sustainable mass-customisation e-commerce business model by combining virtual fitting room tools and luxury unstitched apparel products. The luxury unstitched apparel products are sustainable because they are customised according to personalised body dimensions which adds the benefit of reducing wastage of fabric due to mass production. Moreover, such demonstrations intersecting luxury unstitched apparel product with interactive virtual e-commerce tools would be beneficial for worldwide markets to employ in mass-customisation business approaches.