With augmented reality (AR) becoming more accessible and useful, more and more people are finding unique ways to make it part of our everyday lives, including for products like clothing and packaging.

Augmented reality for fashion is a rapidly-emerging trend, particularly for online store fittings. Brands like Oakley were among the first types of brands to embrace this technology and since then many other fashion brands have followed suit as the technology has progressed.

According to Statista, product returns can cost retailers as much as $550 billion per year, so AR technology can help solve a massive problem.

But virtual try-ons aren’t the only way you can integrate AR technology into your fashion brand.

As seen in the Doddz example in the below section, you can create interactive AR filters for clothing and packaging to enhance the customer experience beyond just fashion.

47% of consumers say they are willing to pay extra for a product if they could customize or personalize the immersive experience.

Although some AR artists are doing this with their art, interactive clothing is a relatively untapped space in the mainstream. Even if you don't know how to make augmented reality filters, this is very accessible and surprisingly “simple” to do.

AR filters can help your brand interact with your customers on a whole new level. In turn, this can increase word-of-mouth marketing and differentiate your products from the rest of the market.

1. Interactive AR Clothing - Create a unique clothing brand that embeds AR filter compatibility into their clothing (like the Kobe Tribute Jacket).

It’s a relatively simple process where the AR filters can be set up to activate after scanning certain images like logos or art pieces (similar to how a QR code functions). After the image is scanned the AR filter can include video, game or other interactive elements. It can even appear to change the clothing fully (think Transformers).

Starting a clothing brand isn’t the easiest thing to do, and it’s a very crowded marketplace. But having this extra layer of interactivity can set you aside from the competition and allow you to tap into a slightly different target market compared to standard clothing lines.

Want to start a clothing brand but don't have loads of upfront capital, storage, and/or time? You can create a clothing company using Print on Demand services such as Printful and Printify. These connect to Shopify easily and do all the heavy lifting for you, meaning you don't ever need to create or ship the product yourself.

There are some downsides to PoD, such as shipping times and lower margins but this can be a quick way to validate the idea without lots of upfront investment (meaning you can put more into the AR elements.

2. NFT Clothing Collection - NFTs aren’t as hot as they have been in the past but there’s still a market for them and they can still be relatively valuable, especially if they offer more than just a jpeg of a monkey.

There's still a lot of money pumping through some projects and it's actually very easy to make your own.

But how can you stand out from the thousands of scammy projects and cement yourself as a legit NFT project? Well, why don't you bring those NFTs to life and make a tangible product (like clothing) with AR interactivity embedded into it?

You could create an NFT series and every time someone mints a new NFT they get a range of clothing with their NFT printed on it. Furthermore, the NFT can be activated using a special AR filter. What the filter does when scanned is entirely up to your imagination, there are so many options here.

This can help build a community and some extra excitement around the NFT project.

The project could allow access to a community, special events & exclusive access to the clothing brand itself (think private access codes for exclusive drops like Supreme).

This could also help increase the resale value of your clothing - and as soon as people learn they can make money out of your product, you’re much more likely to sell that product (and for a lot more than one that can’t).

3. AR Packaging - If you don't want to start a clothing company or you want to provide even more interactive experiences for the customers, you could embed AR experiences into product packaging. This can improve the customer unboxing experience and increases the likelihood that they will share their new purchase with their friends on social media.

This could be done for almost any type of brand, you don't even need to redesign the packaging in most cases if you don't want to. You can make the AR filters work when a customer scans a brand’s existing logo for example.

This can either be turned into an agency that designs the AR packaging and filters or a standalone packaging company that handles the full service.

4. Sell AR services to Clothing Brands - If you don't want to start an e-commerce or NFT project you can also create a service offering to build these AR experiences for other companies.

This doesn't even need to be limited to clothing or packaging either. It could be for beverage brands, company logos, events, restaurants, and so much more.

You can build interactive elements into their existing assets/products or build immersive experiences for their online (or even physical) stores.

This will vary depending on what opportunity you go for (an agency is vastly different to a clothing brand) but a few things are the same throughout:

If you sell AR products:

If you sell AR services: