QR Codes at Ralph Lauren’s Rugby Store

As a follow up to an earlier post, we decided to venture out and see Ralph Lauren’s QR codes in action. At the Rugby store near Union Square, as well as locations in several other cities, Ralph Lauren has inserted touch screen TV’s built into their window displays. The display is linked to the Ralph Lauren website and allows you to select items of apparel and capture their corresponding QR code via your cameraphone. Upon capturing the image, the item is placed in your online shopping cart where you can complete the purchase using your mobile phone, or over the Internet at a later time.

When we questioned the usefulness of this technology, the RL rep pointed out that if you are walking by the store when it’s closed, you can identify a piece of clothing you like in the window and immediately save it to your shopping cart (as well as follow through and actually make the purchase if you like).

While an impressively progressive move by Ralph Lauren, we continue to wonder about the present  usefulness of the technology. Currently, few phones in the US are capable of reading QR codes. This is something that will change with time - we guess it’s just a matter of how much. And the wall mounted interface appears somewhat redundant, as you are really just navigating the RL website. Perhaps it would make more sense if each item featured in the window had a prominently displayed QR code beside it, so that you could immediately snap a picture and put it in your shopping cart, skipping the in-between step of navigating through their site. Overall, though, a noteworthy signal of things to come.