Sydney had to find the perfect pair of jeans for an upcoming event. She dreaded it . Past experience told her that she would try on lots of jeans before she found the perfect pair. This meant getting undressed and redressed over and over and searching racks and racks of jeans until she finally hit on the perfect fit. She felt tired just thinking about it.

Sound familiar?

Well when VOIP and RFID meet interesting things can happen. Mitsukoshi, a Japanese department chain just finished testing a system that uses mobile phone-like PDAs that read RFID tags on jeans. This system lets shoppers search the store’s inventory to find their size and availability from their dressing rooms. Not only that, they can call a sales clerk using the system and have the clerk bring the clothes directly to their dressing room.

This system was pilot tested beginning in February and during the test jeans’ sales increased 15.8 %.
US retailers such as the Home Depot, the Gap, Virgin Mega and Abercrombie and Fitch have expressed interest in seeing demonstrations of this system.

We first heard about this pilot on RFID in Japan.