Size Seeker, you are blowing my mind. A new company about to launch out of University City has the potential to vastly improve the online clothes shopping experience. "Only about 7 percent of clothes are for sale online," says Ian Campbell, co-founder of Size Seeker, which uses Xbox 360 Kinect technology to find correctly sized clothing for online shoppers.
Size Seeker will officially launch at this month's
Philly Tech Meetup. "It's not necessarily bad to be provocative when you are an entrepreneur," says Campbell. "Retail is about entertainment and being edgy." Campbell and partner Mona Safabakhsh met in the Wharton MBA program, where they are both currently enrolled.
"We each had clothing in closets that we'd bought online," recalls Campbell of the company's inception. "It's hard to find what size you are. Due to a vanity sizing problem, you don't know if you're a medium or a large. We both had clothes in our closet that were past the 30 day return window. We'd ended up with clothes that were never worn."
Settling upon the Kinect for Xbox 360 as a means to measure people accurately in the comfort of their own home, Size Seeker built a program that captures the shopper's entire body in a matter of seconds. Campbell compares that with other programs that may take five minutes or longer to achieve the same results. Partnering with
TC Squared, Size Seeker was able to create a database of 100,000 body scans, bringing the accuracy of future scans to within an inch.
Using the Xbox for Size Seeker gamifies fashion, says Campbell, who adds that the online clothing industry shows enormous potential, growing 20 to 25 percent over the last 10 years.
Size Seeker is now looking to hire developers for the data platform. "We are a B to B company," explains Campbell. "We are essentially helping brands and retailers reduce return costs and convert new customers." Size Seeker's technology may have the power to bring the clothing industry up to speed with items such as computers, of which 50 percent are now sold online.
Source: Ian Campbell, Size Seeker
Writer: Sue Spolan