Manufacturers of sports gear, whether from the fitness or mobility sector, have always encountered the same dilemma: every person is built differently. In other words, not every piece of sports equipment fits every body. Wrong fitting often leads to users quickly losing joy and motivation and, in the worst case, to health problems. Precise fitting is particularly relevant when selling premium bikes like the German manufacturer ROSE Bikes does. ROSE offers a comprehensive range of high-end mountain bikes, gravel bikes, e-bikes and many accessories. Every customer who visits a ROSE bike store can be measured manually by store personnel to determine the optimal frame height and the right bike. This process is time-consuming and therefore difficult to scale. Furthermore, manual measuring methods are never 100% accurate. For this reason, ROSE Bikes, known for its innovative ideas in the bike market, has introduced a virtual full body fitting together with NeXR, which offers customers a completely new and faster experience when buying a bike.
In the ROSE Bikes flagship store in Cologne, we installed one of our self-developed and patented Fusion III body scanners. Customers can be measured virtually within a few seconds, completely contact-free and more precisely than ever before. Instead of twelve manual measurements, as previously practiced via the manual ROSE fitting, the human body is analyzed in the scanner using 100 measuring points. This results in a virtual avatar — the so-called „digital twin“ — and is transferred to the user’s Avatar.Cloud app. ROSE specialists can view the exact body measurements in the app (after prior client approval). This makes it easy to determine the optimal frame size and the ideal setup of the ROSE lifestyle and performance bikes.
ROSE customers have been measured in the NeXR Fusion III body scanner at the ROSE flagship store in Cologne since May 12, 2022. Since the launch of this promising project, many ROSE customers have already taken advantage of the technology provided by NeXR. Together with the new type of fitting, ROSE Bikes has been able to generate significant revenue from bicycle sales. In addition, the digitized fitting process saves several minutes on average compared to manual measurement, which means that ROSE’s expert personnel can concentrate even better on advising customers and selecting the right bike.
Beyond the excellent material and parts quality, manufacturers of premium sports equipment like ROSE justify their prices by offering outstanding service.
Customers who visit one of the brick-and-mortar ROSE stores appreciate the individual advice, which usually begins with a body measurement. It is exactly this first step that has some disadvantages: for a mountain bike fitting, the ROSE experts take twelve manual measurements of the customer. On the one hand, this is time-consuming and takes several minutes per customer. On a day with a high visitor load, this can lead to longer waiting times. As a result, potential customers leave the store without a fitting… and without making a purchase.
At the same time, manual fitting, in which ROSE experts also measure the otherwise well-concealed parts of the human body and touch the customer with the measuring instruments, is not everyone’s preference. Since the Corona pandemic, contactless services have also become significantly more important in stationary retail.
Even premium manufacturers such as ROSE Bikes, which already attract a lot of attention from customers through the aesthetics of their products, have to create new incentives to visit the stationary store. ROSE sells its bikes equally via a well-structured and highly frequented online store. This means that concrete customer added value must be created for a visit to one of the ROSE stores.
As an innovative manufacturer in an otherwise quite traditional market, ROSE wants to continue to secure its pioneering position via the customer experience. In the near future, the company wants to leverage further sales potential through digital technologies such as virtual fitting. In particular, there are still untapped opportunities in the area of matching accessories such as bike clothing, which can also be utilized through the use of advanced technologies.
NeXR Technologies offers sports equipment manufacturers, like ROSE Bikes, the ability to revolutionize their fitting experience with the least amount of effort, providing customers with a tailored product selection and an unprecedented level of service.
In the Cologne-based flagship studio, ROSE Bikes customers can be measured within seconds and contact-free by scanning in the Fusion III body scanner developed by NeXR. The resulting avatar, a lifelike digital twin with exact body measurements, enables the selection of the optimal frame size and ideal settings for lifestyle and performance bikes by matching it against 100 measurement points. At the same time, the avatars make future purchases of bikes easier.
Due to its modular architecture, the hardware and software developed by NeXR Technologies is capable of integrating further add-ons into the measurement, for example an additional weighing and associated body analysis process for more precise evaluation of training progress or the connection to an online store for the custom-fit selection of cycling clothing.
At the same time, the innovative virtual fitting provides new arguments for marketing the stationary ROSE stores and offers customers a valuable incentive to visit one of the stores. This is because the virtual avatar created by the NeXR body scanner is the property of the user, and can be individually managed via the AvatarCloud app available for Android smartphones and iPhones. For example, the user can not only find the right bike with his digital twin, but also try on clothes virtually, as our pilot project with H&M already impressively shows. ROSE itself can also use this for itself in the future, for example to offer its customers a virtual fitting of bike pants, jackets or underwear.
NeXR teams from the areas of „Virtual Fitting & Body Measurement“ and „3D Avatar Creation“ were involved in the conception and realization of the ROSE Bikes virtual fitting project. NeXR CMO Christoph von der Malsburg was in charge of the project. On the part of ROSE Bikes, Managing Director Marcus Diekmann took responsibility.
Customer gets scanned in your store.
Avatar gets created
and uploaded to our
AvatarCloud including
body measurements.
The avatars cand the body measurements are ready to use and the right frame size will be shown.
The ideal bike will be proposed by the advisers with the help of the frame size.
Chief advisor at
NEXR Technologies SE
I made the first contact with ROSE Bikes at a trade show in Frankfurt. Right there, a great exchange took place about the virtualization of avatars for bike fitting. The idea was discussed and concretized over several development sessions. In 2022, the time had finally come and the pilot project was launched at the ROSE flagship store in Cologne.
The development of a virtual fitting solution perfectly matching ROSE’s needs was and is the biggest challenge in this project. After the start of the pilot phase, we are now working with ROSE to refine the technology in order to generate further data from virtual fitting that is important for the consulting process.
With the installation of the NeXR Fusion III body scanner and the introduction of virtual bike fitting, the ROSE flagship store in downtown Cologne was able to achieve initial results in a very short time.
Within the first two weeks after the rollout of the fitting service, ROSE Bikes recorded a significant increase of walk-in customers at the Cologne flagship store, partly as a result of promoting the new service.
The body scanner was used by a significant number of customers in the first few weeks, which can also be seen in the increased download numbers of the AvatarCloud app.
Particularly on the busy weekends, the manual measurement of store visitors was largely eliminated, reducing the workload for the expert staff and enabling them to provide more customers with high-quality advice. The time required for virtual fitting was significantly reduced compared to conventional measuring.
Basically, the ROSE flagship store team noticed a great interest and an associated high acceptance for the new fitting service among the visitors.
Since the start of the project, ROSE Bikes has recorded an above-average number of bicycle sales and a notable increase in turnover, which can be attributed in part to the virtual fitting. The introduction of the scanner technology was therefore considered successful by all parties involved. Talks for a rollout in further ROSE stores are currently underway.
„We are relentlessly pursuing new ways to achieve our growth goals by, among other things, simplifying purchase processes and personalizing the customer experience. NeXR Technologies convinced us with their technology to help us determine the optimal frame size for our customers. 100 measurement points compared to twelve with manual measurement offer us completely new possibilities to perfectly adapt our individual lifestyle or highly professionalized performance bikes to the needs of our target group. We can imagine using additional scanners in more stores.“
Due to the great initial success of virtual fitting in the ROSE flagship store in Cologne, we are in talks with the bike manufacturer to expand scanning capacities to other locations. In addition, we are working on digitizing other ROSE products such as bike clothing and offering them for virtual fitting via the AvatarCloud app.
Learn more about our scanner solutions, used for example in the fitness and fashion sector.
Get to know our project with the fashion brand H&M, where we offer a whole collection for virtual fitting.
Follow the press coverage of the ROSE Bikes case.
Learn more about our scanner solutions, used for example in the fitness and fashion sector.
Get to know our project with the fashion brand H&M, where we offer a whole collection for virtual fitting.
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Phone: +49 (0) 30 403 680 14-0
E-Mail: sales@nexr.io
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