Program Participants
FITTIN Co., Ltd.Yumiko Honma
Tell us about FITTIN.
FITTIN is offering a women's underwear fitting service. It offers two services, one which gives recommendations online and another by which users can order custom-made lingerie.
There is data showing that 70% of women are wearing the wrong-size underwear. FITTIN is solving this problem by means of online recommendation and customization.
Speaking of online recommendation, FITTIN's online fitting system determines the closest body shape for the user from data on about 1,000 body shapes and recommends items that fit the user's body shape in response to the user's answers to four questions. When you visit stores, advisers make a fitting choice for you. In FITTIN's service, the knowledge of such advisers is summarized into four questions and turned into an algorithm.
Many cases can be solved by this system, but in some cases, there is no ready-made underwear for people with unique body shapes. In such case, of course, no recommendation can be made. In order to solve this problem, we decided to produce custom-made lingerie. We have also succeeded in using crowdfunding.
Tell us what led you to develop the lingerie business.
Originally, I was working at the EC department of a global underwear manufacturer. At that time, I felt the difficulty of simply selling underwear by electronic commerce since users face difficulty in choosing underwear and knowing the actual size due to the numerous types of underwear. On the other hand, underwear is a product that consumers purchase with the thought of self-betterment in mind so it is often searched for on the Internet where there is only little information. I felt that filling this gap would be a business chance.
Tell us about the future developments.
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We have been running the online fitting service, customization service and media and now we have newly opened a fitting salon. By creating a real fitting salon, we can actually communicate with our customers. Since there are still a number of issues for the site, we will link every measure by covering such issues. We are expecting to focus on the salon also in the sense of a converter to a large business model.