Retail had a problem. A very old, very expensive problem: customers couldn’t picture things. They couldn’t picture the sofa in their living room, the jacket on their body, the watch on their wrist. So they guessed, bought, second-guessed themselves, and returned things. Billions of dollars of things. Every year.
We at RYOT decided that was ridiculous, and that we had the tools to fix it.
What RYOT Built
RYOT — our Augmented and Extended Reality group — brought together people who were genuinely excited about what AR and VR could do for the retail experience. Not in a vague, “the future is coming” kind of way. In a specific, this product, on your body, right now kind of way.
We built experiences that let customers try before they bought — virtually. Furniture in their actual rooms. Clothing on their actual proportions. Products visualised in their actual environments, with real lighting, real scale, real context. The technology had existed in pieces for years. We were the ones who put it together in a way that actually worked for retailers and their customers.
Why It Changed Things
The returns problem in retail is enormous. Customers buy blind, hope for the best, and send things back when reality doesn’t match imagination. AR didn’t just make shopping more interesting — it made it more accurate. When someone could see exactly how a piece of furniture sat in their room, they bought with confidence. When they could try on a jacket virtually, the size they ordered was the size that fit.
That’s not a novelty. That’s a genuinely better way to shop.
What made RYOT’s approach different was that we focused relentlessly on the practical. It had to work in the real world — on normal phones, in normal homes, for customers who had no interest in learning new technology. The wow factor was welcome. But the function came first.
Retailers spend enormous energy trying to reduce friction between a customer and a purchase. We removed an entire category of friction — the uncertainty of buying something you can’t fully experience until it arrives.
That was worth doing. We did it well. And the video above is proof.