“The virtual fitting room created by a Brazilian startup is a leader in global e-commerce”

What the piece reports

An interview, not an announcement, taken at the point the company had become global. Bylined Monica Miglio Pedrosa, it opens on the state of play in mid-2022: the product in more than 500 online stores across 38 countries, revenue past seven figures in 2021, and a US office being opened. The leadership claim in the headline rests on a client count from SimilarTech, which the piece cites.

The framing of the problem is the sharpest in this whole archive, and it is not about clothes. He gives the figure the coverage keeps returning to, that at the time studies put at 37% the share of people who abandoned a clothing purchase online over doubts about size, and then adds the part retailers feel: because the average ticket for clothing is low, the proportional cost of a return lands hard on the final margin. A wrong size is not a customer service problem. It is a unit economics problem.

How the thing was built gets more space than usual. Body data and measurements from Brazil and abroad, compared against each brand's own patterns; an onboarding for every new manufacturer and retailer that maps their sizing into the algorithm; and continuous improvement fed by the returns that come back marked as a size problem, across the 500-plus stores then running it. On the competition, he draws the line at customisation: rivals work from statistics on what most people bought and did not return, while he describes personalising the solution per brand and letting the shopper adjust the fitting room to their own measurements.

The European money is here too, with a number on it. At Web Summit 2018, where StartOut Brasil had taken them, they met Core Angels, which he says invested a seed round of 200,000 euros to start the internationalisation from Portugal. What that bought is the figure the outlet pulled out of the interview and set in large type.

The piece also asks about the outsider problem, since none of the founders came from fashion. His answer is that it was the advantage: they attacked a modelling problem from a direction the industry had not tried, starting simple and arriving at the complex, and a specialist professor of garment modelling told them as much when they showed him the formulas. His own list of what went into the company is worth copying out: mathematics, his UX knowledge, their digital marketing training, and a pinch of commercial negotiation.

Then the answer that shows the most product judgement, because it is a finding against his own interest. Asked about fashion in the metaverse, he says no, and gives evidence rather than an opinion: at one point they built a feature letting shoppers put their own face into the fitting room, and the more entertainment they added to the solution, the less it converted. Online clothing purchases are made on impulse, he argues, and the experience has to carry the least friction possible. Fun moved the purchase to some other day.

The outlet's own site is gone. What is linked here is the copy the Internet Archive preserved, which is why the piece is marked as archived.