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Walmart is collaborating with beauty brand Garnier to bring its Virtual Shade Selector tool to 10 Walmart stores as part of a one-year pilot, according to a press release. The tool helps shoppers find shades that meet their needs with a short diagnostic test and allows them to virtually try on the colors they can get from various Garnier products.
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Shade Selector has been available on Garnier’s website for two months — it’s proven popular, with 30% of consumers completing a 60-second exercise to use it, Glossy reports— and it will now have “display screens at-shelf” in select Walmart stores. The in-store version will also let shoppers test a shade by scanning a product’s barcode. It will eventually appear at some Meijer, Wakefern, and Walgreens locations as well.
Tools that provide personalization and the opportunity to test products in-store can greatly improve the in-store shopping experience. Brick-and-mortar retail has struggled relative to e-commerce in the US, and part of that problem is because these tools are more available online.
By bringing comparable experiences like Virtual Shade Selector in-store, retailers enable consumers to discover and test products they couldn’t otherwise, helping stores better match the online shopping process.
For retailers to get the most out of tools like Virtual Shade Selector, brand-agnostic versions are needed, which may be difficult to accomplish. Walmart and other physical retailers would likely prefer recommendation tools to consider their full selection of products, which would enable these tools to find the best products for consumers across all brands.
But Garnier’s tool is specific to its products, which may be a continuing issue since L’Oréal, which owns Garnier, owns the technology company that developed Virtual Shade Selector, so it may not be interested in bringing in competing brands. Retailers should consider developing these types of tools themselves so they can maximize their value.
This move continues Walmart’s trend of finding ways to bolster its in-store shopping experience with technology. In addition to this pilot, Walmart subsidiary Spatial& is now bringing virtual reality (VR) experiences to its stores.
Walmart’s stores are one of its greatest strengths because of its tremendous footprint, and making store visits more valuable and attractive is key to its future success, so further investment and experimentation in in-store tools and experiences should be a priority.