Abstract

Digital transformation has increasingly been shifting the demographics, shopping habits, and lifestyles of consumers. In particular, the jewellery industry is facing huge challenges of e-commerce proliferation and price competition. Digital technologies, including mixed reality (MR), face recognition, and radio frequency identification (RFID), can help to deal with such challenges by improving product visibility, supply chain traceability, and customer services. However, the development and implementation of these digital technologies take considerable amounts of financial resources and professional expertise, which are only affordable by large jewellery enterprises. Small and medium jewellery companies suffer from digital gaps due to their lack of resources and technological supports.

This project proposes a smart business system (SBS) for the jewellery industry by taking a medium sized jewellery retail company, Company X, as a primary target. The SBS tackles the identified challenges in Company X by enhancing promotion quality, product visualisation, inventory management, communication effectiveness, data management, and customer information utilisation.

The research work mainly focuses on the development of the modules for customer relationship management (CRM) and mixed reality for virtual jewellery fitting (MRVJF), in consideration of time and budget limitations, unavailability, and potential benefits of such modules to the jewellery industry. The CRM categorises customer preferences for jewellery products through analysing customer browsing records and purchase histories. The MRVJF incorporates mixed reality and face recognition technologies to improve jewellery visualisation with interactive virtual fitting.

The significance of this project is to increase the competitiveness of the Hong Kong jewellery retail companies in the global commodity chain through technologies. The MRVJF integrates and promotes the business of Company X with e-commerce. The jewellery visualisation improvement shifts customer shopping habits and broadens the applications of mixed reality virtual fitting from entertainments to retail operations.

This project started with problem identification on the challenges in the Hong Kong jewellery industry and Company X. Secondly, literature on retail management systems, virtual fitting, CRM, and other technologies was reviewed. Thirdly, the smart business system architecture and 70% of the MRVJF were developed. Jewellery realism, visualisation interaction, and positional mechanism are improved compared with existing MRVJF.

For the future work, positional accuracy, dressing up module, jewellery ratio, virtual fitting realism, jewellery reflectiveness, and sparkling effect will be improved in the MRVJF. In the CRM, algorithms for jewellery categorisation and RFID-based customer behaviour analysis will be developed. System verification on the SBS, the CRM, and the MRVJF will be conducted by reviewing system requirement lists and customer usage statistics.