New Site’s Algorithm Promises Bra Shoppers a Perfect Fit

It’s cold, you’re in a room with unflattering fluorescent lights and a full-length mirror, and a stranger wants to wrap your bust in measuring tape. That’s what buying a bra is usually like.
A startup called True & Co has a different experience in mind.
Its founders spent two months visiting San Francisco bra sellers, enduring near-daily bra fittings, in order to distill the process of fitting a bra down to an online survey. Their website, which launched on Wednesday, asks women to answer questions such as “What is the style of your best-fitting bra?” and “Does your bra hurt?” instead of taking out a measuring tape.
The site then recommends a handful of styles from its collection of more than 200 bras and asks users to pick three. It picks two more for them based on an algorithm and, after asking for a $45 refundable deposit, ships them the box of five brassieres. Women keep what they want and send back what they don’t. Shipping is free, and True & Co adjusts future recommendations based on what worked and what didn’t.
Online bra shopping is not an easy code to crack, and — aside from one other startup that fits bras based on women’s favorites — its’ not a niche that many entrepreneurs have attempted to fill.
“The bra is a complex garment that has 20 different components,” says True & Co co-founder Michelle Lam. “They are fit on models…if you are a woman that doesn’t look like that fit model, the bra won’t fit.”
A woman’s size can, for instance, vary between two styles from the same brand because they were fit on different models. True & Co’s algorithm will translate the difference.
Lam says that during the startup’s private beta, 500 women who took the survey on average said that three of the five bras fit them (if you have ever bought a bra, you will recognize this as a small miracle).
“The footwear market is almost double the size [of the intimate apparel market], and women enjoy shopping for shoes,” Lam says. “What potential could this be if women actually enjoyed the experience?”

10:17 by Robert dawne · 1

Women Are More Likely Than Men to Have a Blog, Facebook Profile [STUDY]

When it comes to the demographic discrepancies of social media usage, we tend to think primarily about age. Young people, we assume, are Facebook addicts; older people, we assume, are Facebook-phobes. And while generational divisions have represented, and continue to represent, a primary division in the way Americans use social media, there’s another important factor, as well: gender.
In a report released Friday, Nielsen found that women, overall, are significantly more likely to engage with social media than men. Per Nielsen’s Internet-usage index, women are 8% more likely than the average online adult to build or update a personal blog — while men are 9% less likely to do so. Similarly, women are 18% more likely than the baseline American to follow a brand on Facebook or other social media sites … while men are 21% less likely. Have created at least one social networking profile? Women: 6% more likely to have done that. Men: 7% less likely. Used the Internet to purchase a product featured on TV? The ladies: 12% more likely. The dudes: 14% less likely.
These are striking discrepancies — particularly because they’re not just about purchasing trends. (It’s long been documented — and Nielsen reiterates it in this report — that women are the more active gender when it comes to digital brands and online purchasing. Just as they tend to dominate with traditional brands and analog purchasing.) The Nielsen findings suggest an intriguing generality, though, to women’s digital affinities: The ladies aren’t just more likely to buy stuff online; they’re more likely to be online in the first place. They’re more likely to blog. They’re more likely to be on Facebook or Twitter. They’re more likely, in general, to represent themselves as digital personas.
That’s fascinating, in particular, because it’s part of a clear trend. A June 2010 comScore study found that women, globally, spend more time online than men (24.8 hours a month for women, as compared to 22.9 hours for men.) A September 2011 report from Rebtel, the mobile VOIP provider, found that 68% of women who use the web to stay in touch with friends, family and acquaintances do so using social media, while only 54% of men do the same. And a February 2012 report from the firm Porter Novelli found a similar breakdown: In a survey of U.K. women, 65% said they used social media at least once a week, while only 51% of men said the same. (The same survey, however, found results that contradict one element of today’s Nielsen findings: Men, it concluded, were more likely than women to write their own blogs, read others’ blogs, and comment on others’ blogs.) And a February Pew survey determined that “women use Facebook more than men,” with women averaging 11 updates a week — compared to 6 updates for their male counterparts.
Those are striking findings, and worth many, many follow-up studies. They’re also a good reason for optimism when it comes to the web as an agent of social change.

10:06 by Robert dawne · 0