We Don't Want Your Body Measurements Anymore
When we created Fit First, we thought we knew how to match anyone to perfect fitting clothing. All we’d need are your body measurements so we could rate how well a piece would fit on you.
Over the past six months, we learned two valuable lessons.
Nobody wants to know their own measurements
Even if we had them, it’s still freakin’ hard to match you to clothes that “fit perfectly” because everybody’s “perfect fit” is different
No one wants to know their body measurements
We knew people wouldn’t be thrilled about taking their own body measurements, but measuring yourself seemed easier than digging through the mall all afternoon to find pants that fit. Boy were we wrong.
Taking your own measurements is hard.
Before you can start, you need to strip to your underwear. That’s right, you basically need to be naked, or else you can’t take accurate measurements.
Now that you’re in your underwear, you need to take over fifteen lower body measurements.
First, measure your waist. Keep the tape measure parallel to the floor and wrap it around the smallest part of your torso. Try to stare down to your navel and back up at a mirror to keep the tape level while counting the notches between 39” and 40”. While you’re at it, don’t you dare pull too snug or suck your stomach in or hold the tape too loose. Remember: accurate measurements mean accurate recommendations! Great!
Next, we need your crotch length so your pants will fit your booty. It’s simple: thread the tape from the waist to below the crotch and all the way up to your back, at the same height as your waist.
Two measurements down! Did you succeed? Don’t worry, no one else did either. Didn’t we mention you needed to sign up for a month of yoga to use our product?
Yeah, that was a stupid idea on our part.
We thought we’d make the process easier by offering to come take the measurements for our customers. It seemed reasonable but even our friends hated this idea. Our friends tell us how much they make and share the details of their love lives but draw the line in the sand at the size of their waist.
We had a friend outright tell us, “There is no way in hell that you are getting anywhere close to me with a tape measure.” He wasn’t at his fittest and didn’t want us to know how far off that was.
Another friend, a super fit marathon runner, was equally upset that we wanted her measurements. Marie looked at her skinny waist in awe, and yet, our friend didn’t want to know her own waist measurement.
The dread of knowing the size of your waistline is very, very real.
We learned people don’t know their measurements because they don’t want to. It’s not because they don’t have a tape measure, nor is it about how hard it is to take the measurements. No one wants to define themselves by dozens of numbers, nor do they want to worry about what those numbers mean. Shopping for clothes should be fun, and taking your measurements simply sucks.
Everyone’s “Perfect” Pant is Different
Despite all of that, we charmed fifty customers into giving us their body measurements. That brings us to the bigger problem. Even though we matched customers to pants that fit, we couldn’t match them to pants they loved.
We thought fit could be scored from zero to ten, ten being what a stylist would put you in and zero being a shapeless pillowcase with a hole in it. However, we learned that some people love wearing a pillowcase and hate wearing what “fits perfectly”, according to a stylist. Because everyone prefers dressing in clothing that fits differently, we needed to learn each customer’s personal definition of “fit”.
One of our customers wants dress pants that are longer than her casual pants. Another likes “slim fit” pants, but thought the slim pants we recommended were too slim. We tried describing pants as “super skinny” or “baggy” to improve our recommendations, but no one knew what we meant. We would suggest the technically correct waist size for a customer, and he would tell us the waistband was too tight. Another customer with the same waist measurement thought it was too loose. There wasn’t one “correct” answer for two people with the same measurements!
Although it’s heartwarming that all people are unique, it made it impossible for us to find customers clothes that fit with a simple formula. We could ask you if you liked your pants “loose” or “tight”, but even those words meant different things to different people, regardless of the size and shape of your body.
What’s worse, brands couldn’t agree either! One brand’s “slim” had the same measurements as another brand’s “relaxed”. If brands don’t even know what the fashion lingo means, there was no way our customers would.
This was shaping up to be a whole lot of work for one pair of pants that you may ultimately hate because our “slim fit” isn’t your “slim fit”. Great, that sounds so much better than an afternoon at the mall.
Everybody Knows How They Wish their Clothes Fit
The answer dawned on us one day when we were chatting with a student Chris works with. He reached down to his pants, grabbed the knee and said, “here, this is where I want more room.” He knew his pants, and he knew what he wanted to change about them. Because we knew the measurements on those pants, we realized we could find what he was looking for without his body measurements.
In hindsight, almost every single customer who signed up was like Chris’s student. They told us why they loved their pants or how they wished their pants fit and felt. We finally found a base to compare off of that the customer knows and we know - what they’re currently wearing.
We don’t need to know your body measurements and we don’t need to know how you’d describe the “perfect fit”: we only need your pants. Now, we can tell people who loved Express to try Levi’s 311’s, and that Banana Republic’s slim jeans were great for customers who thought Joe’s Brixton are too loose in the legs.
All of that to say: we’re sorry we made you measure yourself! We’ve gotten smarter. We’re building on what we know everyday. In the meantime, play with our demo and let us know what you think!
