ONLINE FASHION INDUSTRY

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Mirrorsize uses tech developed by IIT-D to solve the issue of fit in the fashion industry

Mirrorsize’s technique of extracting the body size of customers accurately has won it deals with several online-first fashion retailers, both in India and in the US

If Arup Chakraborty has his way, technology built at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi (IIT-D) could soon help global fashion retailers assist consumers find the right fitting trousers or suit through their smartphones.

With retail increasingly going the online way, fit issues are among the highest contributors to returns in the fashion industry, one leading to millions of dollars in lost revenues. Mirrorsize, a two-year old startup, is finding traction among fashion retailers in India and beyond, having already signed up small online brands such as GetStitched, Ira Soleli and Corpqlo.

“Some of our competitors want their customers to buy specialised hardware, some want them to install boxes with an array of sensors inside, but we realised the only way to solve this was to build something that was device agnostic where customers don’t have to spend even a dollar on buying hardware,” Mirrorsize founder and CEO Chakraborty told ET. “Most of our competitors use predictive analytics, we did too until 2017, but then scrapped it because no model can fit 6 billion body types.”

The company along with IIT-Delhi professors Subhasis Banerjee and Sudipto Mukherjee extensively trained machine vision and classical algorithms, coupled with some hardcore engineering to measure the body size of a person standing feet away from a smartphone camera.

The mixing and matching of techniques has created a far more accurate, if not cutting edge, way of extracting body sizes. The company has applied for a US patent on the technology.

The problem that Mirrorsize is trying to solve has been one of the most sought after uses of technology in the industry, even leading to multi-million dollar acquisitions and investments by giants in the space, the door for disruption is still wide open. Even Flipkart-owned Myntra had made an acquisition in this space, and after launching the product within its app briefly, shuttered the project owing to inaccurate size readings.

“We’ve used AI where it works very well and have refined it using classical algorithms and that’s what has helped us get so far. This isn’t something we could publish papers on, this is hardcore development work. Arup gave us a target and we just put it together,” said Subhashis Banerjee, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT-Delhi.

Mirrorsize’s technique of extracting the body size of customers accurately has won it deals with several online-first fashion retailers, both in India and in the US. It’s also gaining traction from large players, with the company being in talks to sign on a large e-commercemajor in the country and a few massive offline brands that are looking at its technology as a way to build lean online businesses.