You coveted those adorable jeans on the website for so long, yet you can’t tell if they’re going to fit you. Wouldn’t it be great if you could try them on before buying them? The Berlin-based company UPcload says that now you can.
Initiating a new era of e-fashion, the UPcload passport allows users to create an online profile of their dimensions and styling preferences, ensuring that “clothing items bought online fit ‘offline,’” according to the company’s press kit.
Using a webcam and an ordinary CD, the photo-recognition software determines the customer’s sizing and dimensions without requiring any fancy scanning equipment. Best of all, creating the passport takes 10 minutes and only needs to be done once.
The company says that this deceptively simple body-measuring system will give a perfect fit each time, no matter what the brand, eliminating the hassle of returns by taking the guesswork out of sizing. The customer’s profile acts as the “passport” to participating online retailers, which offer recommendations based on the measurements.
It will also allow consumers to buy clothes for family and friends, see a visualization of the buyer wearing the items through the Dutch program MimicMe, and even help determine which items go together.
Two friends and graduates of Berlin’s Humboldt University—Asaf Moses, a 29-year-old Israeli, and Sebastian Schulze, 25, who is German—developed the idea in January 2010 after they discovered their mutual frustration from buying poorly fitting merchandise online and not being able to return it.
UPcload, a blend of the words “upload” and “clothes,” has since been voted start-up of the year and has won over $200,000 in prize money and government grants, according to a press release.
The technology behind the company is anything but simple. Developed for the military and semiconductor industries by the Israeli company Imagu, the image-analysis algorithms hone in on images at the subpixel level, which is more precise than standard object-recognition software, giving measurements that “are on average more accurate than those taken by a professional tailor,” Moses told BusinessWeek.
Launching next month, UPcload has already partnered with The North Face and has plans to expand to other stores and markets, like shoes.
