“Meet the startup that won the state innovation contest of Gestão de Valor”
Original headline: “Conheça a startup vencedora do concurso estadual de inovação do Gestão de Valor”
The largest newspaper in the state profiles Sizebay as the winner of the 2018 state innovation contest run by Gestao de Valor, and opens on the problem the company was built around: in Brazil there is no standard clothing measurement, and a large share of shoppers abandon a garment purchase online rather than risk the wrong size.
What the piece reports
The prize is the Projeto Gestão de Valor, run by NSC Comunicação, in its fourth edition that year, and Sizebay won its state innovation contest. The paper did more with that than print a winner's name. It gave the case a feature in its technology and innovation section, bylined Janine Alves, and went back to the beginning.
It opens where the company started. In Brazil clothing measurements are not standardised, and at least 37% of shoppers give up on a garment online rather than risk the wrong size. The origin story it tells is unglamorous: Marcelo Bastos bought clothes as a gift for his wife, the size was badly wrong, and he brought the problem to Janderson, who worked with him at an advertising agency at the time. The paper dates the company to 2013 and says the first two years went into the algorithms that estimate a body and match it against a garment.
Then it names the person most of the coverage leaves out. Patricia de Castro Araujo arrives in the story as the information systems specialist, and what she does is the part that turns an idea into a company.
She went after the programmes and the funds that could help develop the idea. She got us in touch with the anthropometry centres, and from there, with a more defined business plan, the company began to move.
The scale the feature records for late 2018: more than 120 clients, the first international client, and a tool used by more than a million shoppers a month. His own reading of the effect, given to the paper and worth reading as the estimate it was, put about 15% of his clients' sales as influenced by the technology, with returns down somewhere between 5% and 25%.
The sentence to keep is not about the product.
Even with a team 20 times smaller than the competitor's, we managed to win clients, including clients coming from big companies.
That is 2018, long before anyone was selling a small team as a strategy. The feature also shows the mechanism, which is less glamorous than the line: three partners with no overlap. Product research and development plus marketing and communication were his. Finance, investor relations and the commercial side were Bastos's. Operations, customer success and international sales were Patricia's, and the paper's own verdict on her is that she is the one who holds the operation up.
There is no link on record for this piece, so none is manufactured. The photograph above is Janderson on the Gestão de Valor stage, where he presented the case in a full Sebrae auditorium in Florianópolis, sharing the panel with speakers from Mercado Livre.
“The StartOut Brasil program takes 15 startups to Lisbon”
PEGN covers the government mission that took Sizebay to Lisbon with fourteen other startups. It is the start of the European chapter.
“100 futuristic ideas for setting up your business in 2018”
Sizebay is listed in the printed selection of 100 business ideas for 2018 by Pequenas Empresas & Grandes Negócios.
“A virtual fitting room facilitates buying clothes on e-commerce sites”
PEGN's first coverage of Sizebay, in the product's first year.
