I get your point about how busy your wife is, but do you not see the irony? Your doctor wife "needs" to buy a lot of clothes? What, to put under her white lab coat where no one will see them?

Nobody "needs" a lot of clothes. The fact that both you and she think she does is just an artifact of internalizing the recreational drug that is acquisition of shiny things. So your wife's movie is that she that she needs to live up to the public image of a well-respected doctor, and my movie used to be that as a female techie, I need conservative, well-made things to tone down the sex appeal in order to be taken seriously at work. Name any profession, it's not hard to come up with plausible reasons to shop whereas in reality, apart from jobs in fashion, there is little correlation between career and clothes... and even there, you have your models' uniform of jeans with a white tanktop and everyone else in black.

As far as online shopping, yes, it's a recreational activity well-known in the e-commerce world. Shopping sites like Saks and Neiman Marcus get huge traffic spikes on weekend nights, i.e. the time of recreation (just google "drunk online shopping"). However they are in the same boat as the physical stores. If they start optimizing for efficiency, they will lose the impulse buyer, a huge chunk of their sales.

All in all, my point was not that 100% of women are recreational shoppers, even though we overwhelmingly are. It was to bring to the OP's attention the reality of their market. I've wasted my time on a startup that was a time sink similar in the sense that it optimized a big ugly inefficiency that our market just didn't want optimized and my post was motivated by empathy rather than negativity. I still don't want to say categorically that there isn't an opportunity here but I think it's important to go in with a clear head so I wanted to put in my 2 cents, especailly since the OP asked for some female perspective.

I don't think it's fair of you to accuse us of being shiny thing gatherers; I think we're far from that.

That said, working in the hospital means often getting blood/spit/worse on your clothes and needing to buy more. It also means having to dress nicely due to being a professional. She'd rather always wear scrubs, but she can't, and the white coat doesn't always protect her from everything.

My point was that there may be more market than you're suggesting there is.

I didn't argue with you about the recreational thing, but don't you think it's possible to make a site like the OP suggested without making shopping unfun or not recreational? It seems to me you could actually enhance the appeal of recreational shopping if you really thought you could trust the fit of items you were purchasing.

That's so strange! I've never seen a doctor without scrubs, either in an office or a hospital. Isn't blood etc. the reason doctors wear them in the first place? Are you in the US?

My intent was not to accuse you of being shiny things gatherers, sorry if it was unclear. I was speaking in the context of the discussion which was, is fit software a good idea, and you countered with, my doctor wife buys lots of clothes so she'd be a customer (if I did understand your point). If she just needs throw-away clothes to be soiled on a daily basis, she for sure doesn't need software to make them fit perfectly, am I wrong?

> I've never seen a doctor without scrubs, either in an office or a hospital.

Weird... your primary care physician wears scrubs? Pretty much only ER and Trauma docs wear scrubs here in Baltimore. (It was the same in New Haven).

Right now, she basically solves the clothing size problem with retailer loyalty: she knows what size Ann Taylor clothes fit her correctly. Perhaps if she was confident that she could figure out the correct size of items on the internet she'd feel comfortable shopping there.