“Startup creates a virtual fitting room for e-commerce clothing stores”

What the piece reports

Of everything in this record, this is the piece that reached the most people who had never heard of any of it. National television, on the programme Brazilian entrepreneurs actually watch, with the segment preserved on Globoplay.

The story it tells is the one the coverage always tells: Marcelo Bastos bought a gift online, it did not fit, and the idea came out of that conversation with his partner Janderson Araujo. This piece dates the start of the business to 2016.

Then it does what television does well and explains the product to someone who was not asking. The shopper enters what they already know about themselves, weight, age, height, answers a few questions about their body, and the recommendation follows; because every brand has its own measurements, the product is built per brand.

The detail only this piece carries is the unglamorous half of the work. Janderson describes a large database of brands and a team that talks directly to the suppliers, often smaller manufacturers with their own patterns, and helps them define those size tables. A software company doing fieldwork on other people's measurements is not the story software companies like to tell, and it is the reason the recommendation worked.

The commercial shape is here too: a monthly fee that varies with traffic, 170 clients in Brazil at the time, and the expansion abroad already under way. And the results come from a customer, not from the founders. An online business manager for a shirt brand, three years a client, tells the programme that exchanges and returns fell by more than 50% and that sales rose by around 30% on average in stores where shoppers used the fitting room. Those are his numbers on his operation, as the broadcaster reported them in 2019.