Fitbay’s Fashion Selfie Social Network Lands On Android

Fashion selfie social network Fitbay has launched on Android after garnering some 250,000 sign-ups for its web and iOS apps since launch a year ago.

The Danish startup set out with the aim of building another personalized, fashion-discovery shop — along the lines of Wanelo and Lyst — but the twist was a focus on matching users with so-called body doubles (aka other users of similar body size and thus clothes fit) in order to crowdsource clothes fit data. Users can share selfies of their outfits and tag brands and sizes.

Fit continues to be a huge problem for online fashion retailers, with high levels of returns of clothes that don’t fit adding to operational costs — making it an attractive target for startups like Fitbay.

This year Fitbay further tweaked its user experience to foreground selfies, with what founder and CEO Christian Wylonis dubbed a partial pivot — after finding the selfie-sharing aspect of its service was getting the most engagement.

It’s now touting six months of selfie data on its platform, which it says has enabled it to garner more than 130,000 sizes from tagged outfits. This is a crowdsourced fashion fit strategy it will be expanding in the next couple of weeks with the launch of an additional tool that will let users guess their size in any brand, based on tagging done by their Fitbay body doubles.

How accurate this crowdsourced approach to fashion fit is, well, questionable. Fitbay asks users to specify their height and weight, and categorize their body shape (with some basic body shapes like apple or pear), and answer some basic questions about the size of particular parts of their body (such as their arms or torso), but not take actual measurements. So it’s a pretty broad-brush approach.

Add to that ‘body doubles’ on Fitbay are presented to users with a percentage similarity — some of which are so small they seemingly undermine the definition of ‘body double’. Still, Fitbay claims its crowdsourced sizing approach enables it to guess a user’s size with “90 percent accuracy.” It says it’s in talks with retailers about partnerships but has nothing to announce there at this stage.

Fitbay previously told TechCrunch it was hoping to close a Series A round of financing this summer but a spokesman for the startup confirmed it is still on the funding trail. It last closed a $2 million seed round from investors, including New York-based Steadfast Venture Capital and Nordic VC firm Creandum, back in 2014.