Some off-the-cuff comments on in-the-cuff payments
It’s amazing what sort of things trendy youngsters in the payments space are getting up to these days. Only today, I read that the UK-based DressCode has released "the ultimate in geek chic", which turns out to be a shirt with a pocket in the cuff to hold a contactless chip for payments.
The ultimate in geek chic? Sorry dudes. I had a Thomas Pink "Commuter" shirt back in 2006! The Commuter shirt had two features that I really liked at the time. It had a channel running up the inside to carry earphone cables tucked away out of sight. These connected through a hole in a side pocket so that you could keep your iPod snug and out of the way while strolling through London’s fashionable West End listening to the mighty Hawkwind. The shirt also had that second pocket in the cuff to hold a contactless card.
It was designed really for Oyster cards, but we put Visa cards in the pocket to make purchases using standard POS terminals with contactless interfaces. As I recall, we bought a few of them as presents for some of our favourite customers as well! Anyway, I went upstairs and got it out of the wardrobe to model it for you:
The point I used to make was that contactless was about more than the interface, it was about form factors and that it would lead to innovation and I used the shirt to show an example of innovation beyond the card itself. Although the shirt was fun and helped to make an interesting demo about contactless payments in conference presentations, I thought it had two design flaws.
First of all, the pocket was behind the cuff on the top of the wrist. This meant you had to lay the back of your forearm across the contactless POS terminal or Oyster card reader. The pocket really should have been on the underneath of the forearm near the wrist to make paying a more natural action.
The second problem was that if you were wearing a suit and coat, it was hard to get the card close enough for the reader. I remember thinking at the time that I wished that the pocket was in my suit rather than in my shirt.
Naturally, being a consultant rather than an entrepreneurial business go-getter my thoughts went no further. I was surprised to see that only eight years later some entrepreneurial Aussies went and did just as I’d thought about, and put the payment card pocket in the suit! I found out that the dynamic and chic (I assume) menswear specialists M.J. Bale and Visa had teamed up to create a suit with a contactless payment chip and antenna woven into the sleeve! Apparently the "power suit will let men pay 'invisibly' wherever Visa payWave is accepted”. I expect they were planning something for the ladies too but it’s not mentioned in the article.
Anyway, how fun. These days of course I wouldn’t use either the cable run (because I have AirPods - in fact I have AirPods2 which are absolutely awesome) or the card (because I have a smartphone and that’s what I use to pay). Nevertheless, I wish DressCode all the best with their chic project.