Mr. Porter rolls out shoppable Apple TV app

Dive Brief:

Luxury men's clothing brand Mr Porter has rolled out an Apple TV application that allows viewers to shop from videos compiled from the past five years of the retailer’s "shoppable" online magazine, The Journal.
The Mr. Porter digital magazine videos offer sartorial tips, present information from tours of international cities and take consumers behind-the-scenes with tastemakers, according to Luxury Daily.
The app for Apple's tvOS was built using Apple's new Swift 3 programming language, and includes features such as Multipeer connectivity, which allows seamless connection between Mr. Porter's apps across Apple TV, iPhone and iPad via WiFi or Bluetooth.

Dive Insight:

One of the best things about this app is that it is not what it sounds like — an interface to allow you to shop by browsing videos on your TV from the comfort of your living room. Well, it actually is that, but the Multipeer connectivity capability ensures that it is more than that, allowing Mr. Porter to target customers to shop on any device on which they can watch Apple TV, regardless of where they are.

But that is not the very best thing about it. The very best thing about it is that it allows you to shop while watching TV from just about anywhere, including your living room if that's really what you want, and doesn't require you to set foot in a store, which as we all know, is something that guys — even style-conscious guys — hate to do. Contrary to popular belief, guys do like to shop... as long as we don't have to "go shopping."

One of the keys to making this app work of course is the video content itself, and another is convincing people to shop in the app. Mr. Porter is creating video segments from its own established, shoppable online magazine, so it sounds like it already has a lot of content that it can repurpose to make compelling content.

While some might think of something described as a luxury clothing brand to be a bit stodgy, it seems like Mr. Porter is anything but when it comes to exploring new ways to sell its goods. Last year, the retailer was one of the first brands to make use of Facebook's immersive mobile advertising, which also relies on pulling consumers into interactive video content in order to sell them something. Pretty cool, Mr. Porter.