- Title: ESTONIA/UNITED KINGDOM: Robot mannequins help find best fit
- Date: 9th June 2011
- Summary: VARIOUS OF SCREEN SHOT OF COMPUTER SCREEN DISPLAYING VARIATIONS IN GARMENT APPEARANCE BASED ON DATA FROM FITS.ME ROBOTIC MANNEQUIN
- Embargoed: 24th June 2011 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Estonia, United Kingdom
- City:
- Country: United Kingdom Estonia
- Topics: Science / Technology,Light / Amusing / Unusual / Quirky
- Reuters ID: LVAF52GBAASMIG6KNKM130M3OCN
- Story Text: Ever bought an item of clothing online only to find it doesn't fit properly when it arrives? A company in Estonia claims to have the answer. Fit.Me has produced a shape-shifting robot mannequin.
The device - which comes in male and female form - takes a customer's body measurements before changing to mimic their shape. The customer can then accurately see how an item of clothing will fit in what Fits.Me calls a 'virtual fitting room'.
"Getting the right size is just so difficult, between the brands the sizes vary and for customers it's never easy to find out what size fits them perfectly," said Fits.Me CEO Heikki Haldre.
Fits.Me take items of clothing from online retailers. The moveable mannequins are manipulated to show how the garment will look on just about any type of body shape.
"It can go slim and then curvy and for men's versions very muscular," said Mr Haldre. "It can literally take a 100,000 different body shapes and sizes."
The results of the mannequin's work are displayed on the clothing retailer's website, and Fits.Me says customers get a far more accurate assessment of how an item will look when worn than given by existing approaches to buying clothes online.
"A great size is not just a matter of fit, it's a matter of style," said Haldre. "There's a lot of people who prefer to wear the clothes more fitted and a lot of people who prefer to wear the clothes more loosely fitting. Visualising those different sizes on real bodies gives them this answer."
Fits.Me says online apparel retailers have the highest return rate in e-commerce, with one in four garments bought online being returned. It says most returns are due to bad fit, adding the robot mannequins help lower the costs to retailers by reducing the number of returned items.
London-based shirt maker Hawes & Curtis uses the Fits.Me technology for its online sales. The company's head of e-commerce Antony Comyns outlined the benefits of the system.
"It's cutting down on the amount of returns," he said. "For us it's obviously increases your profits because it's quite an expensive operation to be taking in returns but from a customer point of view it's brilliant because you get the shirt first time, you open it, you put it on, and it should fit."
The robot technology has been developed in Estonia by Tartu University and Tallinn Technical University with the help of Germany's Human Solutions GmBH, according to the Fits.Me website. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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