Blog: Is the fitting room losing its lustre?

According to Wikipedia, the fitting room has been around since at least 1883. Highly successfully too: by any measure, fitting rooms are valued by customers and help retailers to close out sales. But a new survey conducted for Fits.me shows that the in-store fitting room is losing its lustre for shoppers: 36% of shoppers admit they use fitting rooms less than they used to, compared to just 6% who say they use them more.

The reasons why people dislike in-store fitting rooms less are not hard to imagine: queues, embarrassment, locked doors, even feeling under suspicion. ‘Too small’ was a big criticism – it might be an interesting diversion to examine whether economic pressures, perhaps in the form of rising rents, have caused average fitting room sizes to fall, just as the floorspace of the average house has fallen for decades.

Of course the elephant in the [fitting] room is the internet: many people prefer to shop online. In fact the survey showed that 52% of shoppers never or only sometimes try clothes on in-store because – they say – they mostly shop online. Since only 12-14% of clothing is sold online, that 52% sounds a bit implausible – I suspect they mean that they would like to shop online. But that is still an important figure, then.

As the proportion of people shopping for clothes online increases – and precisely no-one thinks that proportion is going to fall any year soon – the in-store fitting room is going to look less and less popular in any future survey.So in a sense the raw figures are misleading: people do still love fitting rooms because they are brilliantly helpful - it’s just physical fitting rooms that are losing their lustre. However online shoppers are already starting to see virtual fitting rooms appear in greater numbers as retailers look to bring the benefits of the in-store fitting room into their virtual store – and balance will be restored again.

Find the full survey results here.