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What a great idea. Size me up.
What Size Are You – Really?
You wear size 6 in one brand, and size 10 in another; what gives?
from Tom Van Riper, Forbes.com
If Melissa Adelman's hunch is right, this will be the last January apparel retailers will have to brace for the swarm of customers looking to return or exchange all the ill-fitting clothes they got for Christmas.
The 22-year-old budding entrepreneur thinks she has found a way to help shoppers (mainly women) get the size right the first time - no mean feat in an age of hyper-specialized clothing sizes that vary greatly across different brands and retailers.
In Pictures: What Size Are You - Really?
What Size Are You--Really? - Forbes.com
"Go on Macys.com and you'll see the sizing chart is not uniform across different brands," she says. Example: Shoppers browsing Calvin Klein jeans will see traditional waist sizes with inseams in inches, such as 12 x 32, while browsing 7 For All Mankind jeans turns up just a single number, i.e., a size 24.
Adelman and her partners are putting the finishing touches on their new venture – Size Me Up – which offers an online application designed to give shoppers a quick and easy way to translate their size from one label to another. Do you take a size 10 in Banana Republic's Martin Fit pants? A couple of clicks on the New York & Company Web site would tell you that equates to size 12 in its stretch dress pants.
Adelman aims to convince some 40 major retailers to post the sizing tool on their Web sites - in exchange for either a small percentage of sales, or perhaps a few pennies per click. The incentive seems to be there: While hard data isn't available, surveys conducted by the National Federation over the past two years show that more than a third of holiday gift recipients end up returning their goods. The biggest reason: wrong fit.
The bewildering lack of uniformity is a product of what industry pundits have come to call "vanity sizing" - a thinly veiled attempt by retailers to make weight-conscious customers feel better about their figures. Abercrombie & Fitch loves this game: Customers who typically take a size 6 elsewhere may well find themselves slipping comfortably into a size 2 at Abercrombie.
But it's not just the numbers: Now clothes come in "petite" and "plus," "long-cut" and "stretchy," "skinny" and "slim," "boot cut" and "boot stretch." The result is mass confusion and lost sales.
Take jeans. A pair of Gap size 8 petite, "Long and Lean" jeans is equivalent in size to size 10 short "Straight 77 Stretch" jeans from American Eagle Outfitters. That same shopper could also don a pair of size 31 stretch boot-cut jeans from brand 7 For All Mankind.
As for T-shirts, a size small, short-sleeved number from Ralph Lauren Sport equates to a medium, petite "Favorite Tee" from Gap, and a size 18 crew-neck T-shirt from Petit Bateau.
And in sweaters, a medium cable knit style from Abercrombie & Fitch would work nicely for someone who also fit into a large cable knit from Project E., as well as a small cable knit from Ralph Lauren.
"People don't have time for long lines, and they don't want to waste half an hour with a part-time employee," says Burt M. Flickinger III, managing director at the Strategic Resource Group, an industry consultant. "They also don't have time to go through store kiosks to see what will fit. Something like this can help save the stores from themselves."
Adelman's inspiration came in 2006, during her junior year at the University of North Carolina. As a 5-foot-10-inch, slender female, she never had an easy time consistently finding clothes that fit well among different styles and brands. Figuring she wasn't alone, she approached friend and computer whiz Garrett Berg about building an algorithm to convert apparel sizes from one retailer to another.
The two, along with third partner Jessica Crowell, thought the idea had so much promise that they presented it at the annual Carolina Challenge entrepreneur competition - and took home the $15,000 prize for first place. They added another $48,200 after winning the North Carolina Idea contest the following year. Now help in moving their model into the real world is coming from some former executives at Amazon.com and Saks, both of which have signed on as advisers.
Next steps: securing a patent on the sizing algorithm - before the big retailers do it themselves - and hiring a market research team to get te 10,000 or so survey responses needed to build a size database big enough to convert all those crazy sizes. Indeed, a chunk of that prize money will go toward a market researcher to collect that blizzard of information as quickly as possible.
A tough slog, to be sure, but well worth the effort, hopes Andelman: "In a perfect world, [Size Me Up] would become the industry standard."
You wear size 6 in one brand, and size 10 in another; what gives?
from Tom Van Riper, Forbes.com
If Melissa Adelman's hunch is right, this will be the last January apparel retailers will have to brace for the swarm of customers looking to return or exchange all the ill-fitting clothes they got for Christmas.
The 22-year-old budding entrepreneur thinks she has found a way to help shoppers (mainly women) get the size right the first time - no mean feat in an age of hyper-specialized clothing sizes that vary greatly across different brands and retailers.
In Pictures: What Size Are You - Really?
What Size Are You--Really? - Forbes.com
"Go on Macys.com and you'll see the sizing chart is not uniform across different brands," she says. Example: Shoppers browsing Calvin Klein jeans will see traditional waist sizes with inseams in inches, such as 12 x 32, while browsing 7 For All Mankind jeans turns up just a single number, i.e., a size 24.
Adelman and her partners are putting the finishing touches on their new venture – Size Me Up – which offers an online application designed to give shoppers a quick and easy way to translate their size from one label to another. Do you take a size 10 in Banana Republic's Martin Fit pants? A couple of clicks on the New York & Company Web site would tell you that equates to size 12 in its stretch dress pants.
Adelman aims to convince some 40 major retailers to post the sizing tool on their Web sites - in exchange for either a small percentage of sales, or perhaps a few pennies per click. The incentive seems to be there: While hard data isn't available, surveys conducted by the National Federation over the past two years show that more than a third of holiday gift recipients end up returning their goods. The biggest reason: wrong fit.
The bewildering lack of uniformity is a product of what industry pundits have come to call "vanity sizing" - a thinly veiled attempt by retailers to make weight-conscious customers feel better about their figures. Abercrombie & Fitch loves this game: Customers who typically take a size 6 elsewhere may well find themselves slipping comfortably into a size 2 at Abercrombie.
But it's not just the numbers: Now clothes come in "petite" and "plus," "long-cut" and "stretchy," "skinny" and "slim," "boot cut" and "boot stretch." The result is mass confusion and lost sales.
Take jeans. A pair of Gap size 8 petite, "Long and Lean" jeans is equivalent in size to size 10 short "Straight 77 Stretch" jeans from American Eagle Outfitters. That same shopper could also don a pair of size 31 stretch boot-cut jeans from brand 7 For All Mankind.
As for T-shirts, a size small, short-sleeved number from Ralph Lauren Sport equates to a medium, petite "Favorite Tee" from Gap, and a size 18 crew-neck T-shirt from Petit Bateau.
And in sweaters, a medium cable knit style from Abercrombie & Fitch would work nicely for someone who also fit into a large cable knit from Project E., as well as a small cable knit from Ralph Lauren.
"People don't have time for long lines, and they don't want to waste half an hour with a part-time employee," says Burt M. Flickinger III, managing director at the Strategic Resource Group, an industry consultant. "They also don't have time to go through store kiosks to see what will fit. Something like this can help save the stores from themselves."
Adelman's inspiration came in 2006, during her junior year at the University of North Carolina. As a 5-foot-10-inch, slender female, she never had an easy time consistently finding clothes that fit well among different styles and brands. Figuring she wasn't alone, she approached friend and computer whiz Garrett Berg about building an algorithm to convert apparel sizes from one retailer to another.
The two, along with third partner Jessica Crowell, thought the idea had so much promise that they presented it at the annual Carolina Challenge entrepreneur competition - and took home the $15,000 prize for first place. They added another $48,200 after winning the North Carolina Idea contest the following year. Now help in moving their model into the real world is coming from some former executives at Amazon.com and Saks, both of which have signed on as advisers.
Next steps: securing a patent on the sizing algorithm - before the big retailers do it themselves - and hiring a market research team to get te 10,000 or so survey responses needed to build a size database big enough to convert all those crazy sizes. Indeed, a chunk of that prize money will go toward a market researcher to collect that blizzard of information as quickly as possible.
A tough slog, to be sure, but well worth the effort, hopes Andelman: "In a perfect world, [Size Me Up] would become the industry standard."
Blasphemy!
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