Finding clothes that fit is an important part of looking nice/stylish. It's also a serious hurdle to shopping online and why I never do it. I think a service like dress.me will need to address this in some way or the process will remain somewhat anxiety-laden.
Returns are always a pain in the butt. No matter how easy you make it sound, people are going to be anxious about it. But even assuming returns are effortless, they're a HUGE money sinkhole for online retailers (Zappos returns average 35%).
And a huge time sinkhole for me. I have a few tshirts that don't fit very well and didn't bother returning because I didn't want to take the time to go to the post office and wait for the package to come back.
No, the advice would be killer. I don't even know what to order, and then when I got it I wouldn't know how to evaluate it to decide whether to return it!
That works for things like shoes and t-shirts, but not trousers and regular shirts. It sends a bad sartorial signal to tell people just to slap on something with a decent-ish fit.
It's fine for a shop, but bad for something aimed at dressing people properly and teaching them how to do so themselves.
As a shop, it would be really cool to commission a set of really cheap "try-me-ons" in every size. You could then send these out to people for free with a prepaid return envelope - very much like online jewellers will send you a paper ring sizer for free. Just have people input what they reckon their size is, and send them that plus two sizes on either side. Make them as plain, cheap and flimsy as possible - cheaper postage, people don't order them as free clothing ('Unlimited supplies of plain white tees? Yes please!'), and if you don't get them back it doesn't cost too much.
Unfortunately, due to the differences in sizing between manufacturers, you'd probably have to be commissioning your own products for this to work, but it would be very cool for an off-the-peg suit shop, medium-high end lifestyle catalog (Land's End, etc) or something similar.
You may need fitting guides to show people how particular pieces of clothing should fit (trouser crease should break just above the shoe, shoulders should fit without bulging or sagging...) For bonus points, produce them with several different models with different body sizes - for me, having a heavier guy modelling a suit and showing how well it can disguise a gut would be a major selling point :)
Except that fit is often dependent on style. I have clothes in the same category but different styles from the same retailer where I need different sizes; heck, occasionally I've ended up having to compare different copies of the same garment in the same size, because copy variation made a worthwhile difference to fit. OK, maybe I'm a picky guy with my wardrobe ;-)
Shoes, speaking personally, would be a total non-starter online. I seem to have narrower heels than many; I'll routinely find myself searching styles to find the ones that fit me properly there rather than slipping, even if they're right elsewhere. I'm sure some others will be a little wide acrosss the toes and need just the right level of bulging across the front, or a different arch height that makes positioning of the insole's mound under the bridge or the tongue important for their comfort.
tl;dr: I can't always just buy a certain size and know that will be right. If your business model is dependent on that being possible, it won't work for me and I doubt I'm unique.
Yes, that's definitely true. Never thought of trying different instances of the same size and same style myself, actually... it's often hard enough to find a single instance!
Perhaps what we just need is rapid prototyping for clothes: "I'd like one like this, but with a more generous waist". Like bespoke tailoring but cheap and quick.
Never thought of trying different instances of the same size and same style myself, actually... it's often hard enough to find a single instance!
Agreed. It's not something I've done very often, but (for example) when you notice that the same trousers in two different waist sizes has different leg lengths in spite of what the tickets say, it's worth checking another pair sometimes.
There's a startup that does 3D scans of shoes and allows users to determine the perfect fit by asking about shoes they already own (can't remember the name). IIRC, they plan on doing clothes, too. That would be the ideal.
I once tried comparing official clothing measurements from various vendors online and came to the conclusion that they were all lying. Short of 3D scanning or painstaking measurement by hand, there isn't an easy solution. It certainly seems like a problem ripe for the picking.
>There's a startup that does 3D scans of shoes and allows users to determine the perfect fit by asking about shoes they already own (can't remember the name). IIRC, they plan on doing clothes, too. That would be the ideal.
Wow, someone please come forward with the name of this startup. I need new shoes, and if this works I'm spreading the news to everyone I know.
Thanks for the link. I tried it a couple of times for a couple of different fits and I wish they had more refinement options .. like options to tell what fits to avoid and more than 1 recommendation, stability/pronation et al. for running shoes, etc.
Also sucks that for all my fits, it always showed an Asics product, a brand which I personally don't like as their fits / soles are the worst for me.
Hey, I'm one of the Shoefitr co-founders. The demo on the homepage assumes you're buying the Asics GT-2150 and just need to know what size to buy (and how it will feel). You can try it for all sorts of running shoes at http://www.runningwarehouse.com. Suggesting new products based on what you currently wear will be rolling out soon...
> There's a startup that does 3D scans of shoes and allows users to determine the perfect fit by asking about shoes they already own (can't remember the name). IIRC, they plan on doing clothes, too. That would be the ideal.
It would be really cool to hack a Kinect (or more likely, several Kinects) into doing something like that for clothing.
A friend of mine does custom dress shirts (http://propercloth.com/) and one of his solutions (besides the detailed measurements option) was to get base measurements from a whole range of retail shirts and let people pick a shirt that they already owned that fits them well and tweak from there (too long/short, tight in the chest, etc.) and then have a very liberal return policy (at least on the first shirt). It's definitely labor intensive to get started (both building up the measurements database plus learning how to tweak them based on the comments), but it seems to work well.
Online clothes shopping works when you want to buy something that you already know, know how it fits and maybe want an extra color or style. I usually shop for pants online, from brands that I know will have a good fit and cuts that I already have at home.
It is a hurtle when shopping in stores too. It would be nice if there was a fit feedback for each piece of clothing bought. Then the service would only show clothes that fit like earlier clothes that I have bought and rated high.
