Fitted Fashion Promises the Perfect Pair of Jeans

Posted by Soren Sorensen

The idea for Fitted Fashion came to Jamal Motlagh while interviewing over 200 young men about shopping for, trying on and purchasing clothing.

“I asked each of them what article of clothing was the most difficult to buy,” Mr. Motlagh told the New England Post, “and literally every single one of them told me jeans.”

A Harvard Business School graduate, Mr. Motlagh said he knew intuitively that for some consumers, jeans aren’t the easiest purchase to make.  Still, the homogeneity of the male interviewees’ responses surprised him.

“I then asked a bunch of women and they gave me the same idea.”

Then lightning struck.

Through research, networking and brainstorming with friends, Mr. Motlagh decided that someday soon, as a result of the ubiquitous frustration with buying jeans, and the explosion of digital technology, everyone’s clothing might eventually be custom designed and manufactured.

Mr. Motlagh wondered how he could create a better way to buy jeans and decided that the problem was simple but the solution would be complicated.

“I realized that jeans come in certain sizes but people have many different body shapes that aren’t properly represented by simple waist and length measurements.”

Like several of the startups at last Thursday’s Betaspring Summer ’11 Demo Day in Providence, Fitted Fashion uses technology to solve a common problem.  Mr. Motlagh’s cofounder, Charles Tse, is slightly shorter than average in stature.  Mr. Tse found it so difficult to buy jeans that he had a similar idea to Mr. Motlagh’s three years before his taller business partner.

Fitted Fashion’s digital tailoring device is like a cross between a changing room and a high tech photo booth with one important distinction, for those of us who are a bit squeamish about having our bodies scrutinized.

“We don’t take photographs.  Our technology employs white light.  Essentially, what that means is that we shine lights on you, not unlike fluorescent light bulbs.  The lights provides us with a three dimensional data cloud,” said Mr. Motlagh.

The whole process, Motlagh said, is not unlike stepping into a changing room for a moment, removing your outer clothing, standing still for a few moments while the lights do their work, dressing and stepping back out.  Only, with Fitted Fashion, a customer only needs to go in once.

“Customer information,” Mr. Motlagh said, “is stored securely and so nonspecific that a person wouldn’t be able to identify his or her own data cloud.  We don’t measure skin color, hair or facial features.”

The digital tailoring device generates this “cloud,” 200,000 data points, in around 30 seconds.  The customer then chooses features like cut, rise, fit and color and the jeans are shipped to his or her home.

Once customers have completed the digital tailoring process, they can log on to Fitted Fashion’s website and purchase other items from Fitted Fashion and, eventually, other designers too.

At Demo Day last week, Mr. Motlagh told the audience, “We’re here to enable other brands and other producers to create custom clothing.”

Jamal Motlagh thinks frustration with all clothing, not just jeans, is a universal headache.  He opened his Demo Day pitch by asking the audience, “Why are you buying clothing modeled after someone else?  Why aren’t you the body model for your own clothing?”

“Once we have our data,” he continued, “we can make shirts, jeans, dresses, business wear, bathing suits and even underwear.”

Mr. Motlagh and Mr. Tse were both wearing suits designed and manufactured according to Fitted Fashion’s digital tailoring process and (please forgive the editorializing) they both looked quite dashing.

“We’re still perfecting it,” Mr. Motlagh told the New England Post.  “There’s still work that we need to do.  But we’re confident that we’re going to get to a point where just about all of our jeans are going to fit perfectly the first time.”

Fitted Fashion hopes that “jeans parties,” like 1950s Tupperware parties, complete with wine and cheese, will introduce consumers to the idea very soon.

To close his pitch last week, and demonstrate the potential size of the custom clothing market, Mr. Motlagh told the audience, “Raise your hand if you wake up every morning and put clothes on.”

Everyone raised a hand.

“Keep your hands up if that process could be better—you don’t like how the clothing fits you or you don’t like the shopping experience.”

All the hands stayed up.

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