The Feat of Fit
Today, I’m excited to announce a new product that radically transforms our business model, SIZERIGHT. Rather than producing custom insoles to solve poor fitting and uncomfortable shoes, we are moving upstream to focus on the source of the problem. We are refocusing our sights on the footwear industry, and we will be partnering with the most innovative, forward thinking brands to solve the biggest problem in the footwear industry today, and chart a course for the future of footwear.
Over the past three years, we’ve analyzed hundreds of thousands of images of feet. We’ve provided thousands of doctors with our products, and talked with hundreds of footwear brands. We’ve built two product lines, SOLS Rx and ExoSOLS, that transform foot photos into custom orthotic insoles, digitally manufactured on demand. We’ve become the industry leader in 3D technologies for footwear, and we’ve built and patented some pretty insane technology to do it: computer vision, deep learning, photogrammetry, biomechanics, and additive manufacturing, all to enable perfect fit. We’ve also learned some stuff about shoes along the way.
We’ve learned that it takes more than a quick test walk around a shoe store to figure out if a pair of shoes will fit. We often think new shoes fit fine until the end of the first day wearing them. We’ve learned that we don’t prioritize fit until it’s too late, and our favorite shoes are gathering dust in the back of our closets. We’ve learned that the standards for shoe sizing differ regionally because apparently people used things like barleycorn for determining standard increments of shoe size, and ancient crowdsourcing for determining the length of a foot. Consider that the length of a foot wasn’t internationally standardized until 1959.
Stand at the door of a church on a Sunday and bid 16 men to stop, tall ones and small ones, as they happen to pass out when the service is finished; then make them put their left feet one behind the other, and the length thus obtained shall be a right and lawful rood to measure and survey the land with, and the 16th part of it shall be the right and lawful foot.
Fit is the largest problem preventing shoppers from trying new shoes and new brands online. With footwear eCommerce sales growing 15% YOY, retail sales stalling, and sit-and-fit stores being replaced by eComm giants with free returns, the industry is paying billions each year in reverse logistics. We return 30% of the shoes we buy online. 5% of the price of every pair of shoes you buy is attributable to the cost of returns. Of the ones we do keep, 53% still aren’t the best size for us. The time to fix fit is now.
Our mission has not changed. We are making perfect fitting footwear accessible to everyone. Our path to get there is reinvented. We are driven by the potential of our computer vision and machine learning technology to restructure an industry, to enable data-driven product development, and to eliminate the billions of pounds of waste and scrap produced each year by a system that is ripe for innovation. We are driven to improve the lives of hundreds of millions of frustrated consumers that suffer from shoes that don’t fit. We are doing it with the enthusiastic support of our investors, our shareholders and much to the excitement of our partners — We are tackling fit.
Humans have been wearing shoes for 40,000 years. Now, for the first time, there will be a comprehensive solution to shoe fit. In a few short months we’ll be launching SIZERIGHT. A simple, intuitive app that uses our patented customization technology to make sense of footwear manufacturing, normalizing the complexity and chaos of +13,000 brands with different sizing systems to create a universal sizing layer that spans lasts, factories, brands and online stores.
Sign up for our waitlist, snap a selfie with your fave shoes and tag it SIZERIGHT to sign up your brand. We can’t wait to meet your feet.
