3D virtual glasses try-on

A physical behavior with no digital equivalent — across four optical businesses.

Choosing eyeglasses is a face-shape decision made in a mirror. That single physical behavior — putting frames on and turning your head — carried most of the purchase confidence, and it had no digital equivalent. Online, customers were asked to buy something highly personal from a flat product image.

The immediate opportunity was to close that confidence gap for JCPenney Optical. But this work did not sit inside a single-retailer digital operation. It sat inside a broader optical portfolio spanning JCPenney Optical, BJ's Optical, Boscov's Optical, and Meijer Optical — four businesses with different retail partners, different customers, and the same fundamental problem of asking someone to choose frames without trying them on.

That changed the shape of the opportunity. A confidence gap that exists identically in four businesses is not four separate projects waiting to be funded. It is one capability question, and the only real decision is whether you build it that way from the start.

What I owned, led, and influenced.

I led the launch of the virtual try-on experience, working on how the technology became something customers would actually use rather than a novelty they tried once.

Because my remit spanned the wider optical portfolio rather than one retailer's site, I was also thinking about the second question from the beginning: if this works, what does it take to put it in front of customers of the other optical businesses without starting over? I pushed the case for building it as a reusable capability with the potential to be leveraged across additional optical brands, rather than as a feature scoped to a single retailer.

Teams, systems, and constraints involved.

Emerging technology brings a specific risk: the demo works beautifully and the real experience disappoints. Camera permissions, device variation, lighting, and rendering fidelity all sit between a promising capability and a customer who trusts what they are seeing enough to buy.

Designing for reuse added a second dimension, and it was the harder one. Each optical business had its own retail partner relationship, its own brand presentation, its own frame assortment, and its own commerce flow. Anything tailored too tightly to one brand's catalogue, visual system, or purchase path would foreclose the possibility of extending it — so decisions about integration points, product data, and configuration had to be made with a wider set of businesses in mind than the one immediately in front of us.

That is a genuinely uncomfortable way to work. It asks a team delivering for one brand to accept constraints in service of brands that are not paying for this release, on the argument that the option value is worth it.

Build once. Learn. Scale across brands.

The experience gave customers a way to digitally try on frames and see them on their own face, converting an in-store behavior into an online one and replacing guesswork with something much closer to the physical decision.

Structurally, I pushed for it to be treated as a platform capability rather than a page feature — scoped, integrated, and specified so that extending it across other optical businesses remained a real option instead of a rebuild. JCPenney Optical became the place the capability was proven and learned from, not the boundary of where it could go.

“Build it once in the business best positioned to prove it. Learn there. Then scale what worked.”

Aligning teams and moving the initiative forward.

I worked to keep expectations calibrated: clear about what the technology could genuinely deliver, and equally clear about where it would not yet hold up. That honesty protected the launch from overpromising.

I also made the reuse case in commercial terms — the cost of building this once per optical business versus building it once and extending it — which is what moved the conversation from a single-brand feature to a portfolio capability. Framing it as option value rather than idealism is what made the constraint acceptable to the team delivering the first release.

The impact that resulted.

JCPenney Optical launched a 3D virtual try-on experience, giving customers a way to evaluate frames online with meaningfully more confidence, and establishing a capability positioned to be leveraged beyond a single optical business.

In the same period, JCPenney Optical recorded a 30% increase in web traffic in one month. Several digital efforts were running concurrently across the optical portfolio at the time, so that figure belongs to the programme rather than to any single feature — including this one. What it does establish is the environment this work launched into: a growing audience, and an organization actively investing in its optical digital experience.

The leadership capabilities shown.

Applying emerging technology with commercial discipline: solving a real customer problem, resisting novelty for its own sake, and designing for reuse so the investment compounds across a portfolio rather than terminating at one brand.

It also demonstrates the habit that later defined larger work — looking past the property in front of me to the portfolio around it, and asking what could be built once and used many times. The same instinct applied at greater scale across the LIXIL multi-brand ecosystem.

• Emerging Technology
• Digital Product
• UX
• eCommerce
• Innovation
• Scalable Platforms
• Multi-Brand Portfolio