Saturday, Aug 11th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
Categories:
Advertising;
Social Software;
Shopping
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“Sears has launched a virtual closet, called e-Me, for the promotion of its back-to-school season …”
Sears has launched a virtual closet, called e-Me, for the promotion of its back-to-school season, partnering with Meez and Virtual Model, which powers Meez.
The site basically operates as a Sears-branded Meez. All the clothes to choose from are those that are being pushed for the back-to-school shopping season, such as The Cheetah Girls line and Canyon River Blue. Real photos are used for the items you can select for your Meez, though a digital representation is used for your actual avatar. All the other functions for Meez is included for the Sears-branded version, including backgrounds, pets, hairstyles, etc. There’s also a gallery for users of e-Me, where you can check out other users’ creations and rate them. Sears has indicated that it will be adding games and other user interaction in the future. Items can be saved to a closet and printed out for an in-store discount on clothes.
[Mashable: Link]
“Meez is a website that allows users to create their own animated avatars, or “3D I.D.” graphics, for the Web.” Wikipedia.
Further evidence that there’s money t0 be made in cyberspace … or that there’s money to be made selling cyberspace to Sears et. al.
Japan is clearly a nation that worships shopping, a nation that has taken the retail experience to its bosom and raised in its honour a frenzy of poured concrete and burnished chrome, a hypermarket for saints. You can wander into a Japanese department store and lose an entire day, without even scraping the surface of the mall it’s embedded in. My personal nemesis is Yodabashi Camera: a department store that has a clothing and houseware department embedded in it where most such shops would feature an electronics boutique department. Half of the sixth floor of its Yokohama branch is given over to capsule toy vending machines, where for 200 yen (about 80 pence) you can turn the knob and acquire a tennis ball sized bundle of mysterious plasticky goodness with a model kit of some complexity within. My favourite … is a capsule toy that contains a self-assembly model of a capsule toy machine, complete with tiny capsule toys ready to vend. Even the toys teach recursion …