Over 10 billion shirts and shoes will soon talk back to you via your phone

Fortune 500 company Avery Dennison and IoT startup EVRYTHNG have done a big deal to ‘switch on’ the apparel industry. This will enable a minimum of 10 billion apparel and footwear products to be created with unique digital identities and data profiles in the cloud over the next three years.

The companies claim this will be the largest number of IoT-connected products in a single deal ever. EVRYTHNG has raised $14.5 million in three rounds from six investors, including Atomico, Dawn Capital and Cisco among others.

This is what the Internet of Things looks like at enormous scale.

What does this actually mean, though? Well, it means 10 billion products from some of the world’s biggest fashion and performance apparel and footwear brands will be able to connect to smartphones to trigger applications and services.

Aside from allowing brands to engage customers more, it will mean consumers being able to interact with their products to unlock personalized digital content, services, offers and extras, or link to third party apps for other rewards and benefits.

That opens up a wealth of new possibilities on the enterprise side, but will also make buying a shirt a little more interesting.