This story is heartbreaking to read as a founder, but boy oh boy are there parallels between making bras and recruiting marketplaces. I"m the founder of interviewing.io, and we think about stuff like this a lot.
1. To scale, you must first become recruiters. And then, unless you're careful, you are become Shiva, a recruiting agency. And then you can't scale because you hired a bunch of in-house recruiters (maybe you're clever and call them "talent advocates") and are forever constrained in the best case to linear growth, growing as a function of how many recruiters you hire.
2. AI-based recruiting solutions that claim to match candidates to companies don't work for the same reason you can't use ML to engineer bras. The data isn't there. Scraping LinkedIn and GitHub doesn't do it, and then you have to bespoke "measure" a bunch of candidates. The hard part of that venture, in this market, isn't doing the ML. It's getting candidates (who have more leverage than you and don't need you) to give you interesting data about themselves.
3. "I thought that the likeliest outcome of launching is to end up like Peach/Zyrra, in which they launched their patented custom-made bra service, pivoted to a traditional lingerie product, and now sell women’s apparel loungewear. While the concept sounded promising, they were in the end unable to turn the concept commercial with the capital they received"... How many recruiting marketplaces have pivoted to do SaaS hiring assessment tools? I can think of at least 3.
Automating stuff by hand is hard. It's even harder when you don't have data and when it was never done well by hand in the first place.
I remember sharing it with my partner who is in a less common cohort and had done plenty of research prior to my sharing this with them... they were not at all impressed and felt like there was something lacking in their methodology and priors.
Specifically, my partner has found that the most consistent and predictable sizings are from the UK -- everything else is more all over the place and must be tested on a per brand and pattern basis.
The post by A Bra Theory states it can take as many as 9 attempts with their system to achieve a fit.
With US sizes and her proper measurements, it can take 3-4 attempts for my partner to find something that fits or determine that they do not carry anything that will. With UK sizes and her proper measurements, there is typically success within 1-2 iterations.
> While tailors have figured out a formula for men’s suits, bra tailoring is a younger technology with a smaller market and far fewer competitors. [...] But bras, coming after the Industrial Revolution, had no such history of custom tailoring.
Even companies trying to custom-make suits without multiple individual fittings are apparently still very much wandering in the wilderness, so it's not surprising (though of course disappointing) that an effort which started futher behind didn't succeed. Maybe this also relates to Boeing and SpaceX's parachute challenges https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21850831 : it seems fabric remains hard.
Fabric is a very hard problem because it has an extremely high number of degrees of freedom. Flexible materials are like this consistently. If you want automation, with few exceptions, you want stiffness.
Tesla has been unable to automate wire harness installation because it's super flexible with many effective degrees of freedom (they hope to solve that using a stiffer flex cable that consolidates the wiring). Even moving some fiberglass fluff with a robot was an unreliable bottleneck they eventually removed.
I even saw a project once that attempted to automate cloth handling by first stiffening the cloth with starch so it could be more predictably moved from place to place.
Cloth is fundamentally hard. It's not impossible to solve these problems, but it's not at all trivial.
It is more than just the age of tailoring vs undergarment making that is the problem. If tailoring was the only issue, we would just tailor women's undergarments and declare success. The real issue is that women's bodies are far more variable than men's bodies. Most garment designing software gets around this by fitting exactly the hardest part of the body and then scaling everything else. Bras are one of the more difficult parts of the body to fit although the hip area (pants) are also difficult to fit for the female form.
Pants actually illustrates the problem in a way that everyone (men as well as women) would understand. You can't just take a few measurements and expect success. You have to know how the measurement is distributed. Is the added inches on the stomach? Is it on the hips? Is it on the posterior? I won't go into the many crotch measurements - but they are also important.
I buy my dress shirts at Indochino. They do multiple first measurements on you the first time, then they make a first iteration shirt. You come for a second fitting with that shirt when they look how it sits and re-adjust the measurements which are stored in your profile and all subsequent shirts are made to them. The result is pretty good. Never been to a custom tailor but I guess this is a good industrialized approximation of what they do. I am wondering if something like this could have worked.
Ever since I came across this video https://youtu.be/gy5g33S0Gzo?t=4 of a robot taking 1,5 hours to fold five towels, with mixed results, I think about how much of our brain might be devoted to handling fabric every time I have a towel in my hands. Probably the same with handling fluids, like predicting how milk is going to behave in an opaque carton.
I think maybe the problem is that they swung for the fences out of the gate — a general solution to automatically creating custom fitted traditionally made bras for any body type.
They could have maybe had more success by being less ambitious:
Focus on one body type that has a relatively easy solution to make the ‘perfect bra’
Make custom bras that are close and require a single trip to a tailor for small adjustments — or one that enables the customer to make markings somehow and send it back to the company to adjust.
A “smart bra” for fitting that has sensors that send measurements about stress and weight distribution.
Try and figure out new materials and construction methods that cover up for inadequacies in the fitting algorithm. Make something that looks unusual but works — like crocs shoes. Some people will hate it but others will swear by it.
I intend this reply to supplement your list of challenges, all of which are valid. I hope this helps convey an additional depth of complications in designing women's elastic support wear that may not be immediately apparent.
> You've got a data capture problem
The missing piece here is the intersection of: clothing "fit" problem, where each person's body will interact with clothing at different points; the gravity "g-forces" problem, where the clothing is required to bear weight at every step without tearing apart; and the appearance "fashion" problem, where different shapes carry that weight at different points.
I'll take apart t-shirts first, and then switch back to bras.
Given several men of slightly different torso composition, a simple men's t-shirt can interact with their belly, lower waist (shirt length), ribcage, nipples (ask any runner), armpit, upper arms, neck. At each of those interaction points, the clothing must fit 'correctly' as perceived by the human being. Each human being has a preference for each of the listed areas, and will complain about poorly-fitting t-shirts if they do not fit 'correctly'.
I require loose armpit and long length shirts, among those seven options, and have more or less given up on ever finding a solution for my abnormally-shaped ribcage. So I typically end up in men's XL, because it provides enough 'airspace' to smooth out my torso and extends low enough to keep me from flashing people.
Someone else with the same torso length, torso diameter, and waist measurements might choose a Medium instead, because they have a decked-out bod and want to show off every curve. They'll need shirts made with more stretch than mine, or else they'll rip the armpits open waving hello to a friend. Shirts designed for a tight fit use a different 'cylinder' cut than shirts designed for a loose fit, so you can't just put them in my sized-down XL because I've been selecting for a different cut of shirt than is appropriate for their desires — and you can't just shrink all dimensions on an XL by 30% to get a M because human body parts don't shrink at the same percentage rate.
So, you can evaluate the 'fit' of t-shirts based on these criteria, none of which can readily be captured by 'shape data' alone:
* Does the shirt show off, or mute/hide, your physique to the degree you desire?
* Does the shirt rub uncomfortably, or rip/tear, when you move while wearing it?
* Does the shirt fabric irritate your skin, at your desired tightness?
You can custom-bespoke every shirt to a person's shape, but you'll still have to make fashion decisions ('drape', for example) that will include some and exclude others. If you end up deciding to print custom-fit "perfect mirror of your shape" fashion, that is fashion, too, and I would loathe it with all my heart because that is not what I want my clothing to express.
Moving on from the t-shirt analogy to bras, there are additional problems that bras have to solve for, that t-shirts do not:
* Bras are held with elastic against an extremely sensitive area of skin for hours at a time (sweat is a primary concern)
* Bras need to provide front and back appearances that matches the desires of the wearer (padded, unlined; demi, full coverage, balconette, push-up; longline, racerback, strapless)
* Bras need to provide support for 'weight' anchored to both sides of the chest (US average ~3lbs/side, K cup ~8lbs/side), that can cause pain every time you take a step, encounter small vertical G-forces (stairs, elevators, cars), or large all-directional G-forces (cars, subways, sports)
* Bra elastic loses stretch over time, due to wear and tear from the thousands of G-force events per day they intercept and reduce bodily impact of (adjustable straps, multiple rows of hooks, discard and replace occasionally)
So, not only do you need shape data, you also need "fashion" data, "fit" data, "fabric" data, and "gravity" data. You need data about composition — density for compressibility, shape for support and fashion, total weight for structural integrity — that you can't measure at home easily if even at all. You need material that can stand up to being punched from within a million times that also feels comfortable when held skin-tight all day. You need to make it fashionable, while keeping it fashionable across multiple size vectors (band size can vary from 24" to 48" or more, cup size can vary from 1/AA to 8/H or more). You need to transfer G-forces from the wearer's chest to the elastic while not digging into their skin more than they can bear (bralettes, underwires). You need to plan for elastic weakening over time (adjustable straps, multiple sets of back hooks).
Many men only see that level of tailoring in bespoke suits/tuxedos, and wear them once a year or less, and suffer no consequences the rest of the year. Many women have to wear one every single day, or else they suffer chest pain (F=m*a with only skin and ligaments to bear it) and/or societal outrage. It's a really intense market to try and serve.
You have a loving family, don’t sell yourself short :)
If there’s one practical takeaway I would offer here for men in general —
Having read this it’ll be much easier to understand why good bras can seem so simple yet be so expensive and fragile to care for and difficult to find.
Bras are maximally frustrating, and there’s nothing really equivalent at all in men’s clothing. Be kind when shopping for them. Help with hand washing them. Be encouraging in appropriate ways.
There is also the 2D to 3D problem, if you’ve ever tried modeling clothing on a mannequin to make patterns, you’ll notice how much skill it takes on a doll with perfect measurements. I think the problem here is there is way to much variance in shapes to come to a custom 1:1 for everyone. People are asymmetrical, and proportions vary wildly. I mean you could cut corners, but you probably end up generalize to the extend that it isn’t really custom fitting anymore if you want to scale this up.
Yes, that would be really cool. I found some bras that fit me well for a time, but seem to wear out. By day, I'm a composites engineer, so I would love to use some really good patterns and see if I can make one with Kevlar or something that will wear out more slowly.
A good source of data to build an algorithm for bra fitting, is women tailors in India. Specifically, I would ask and observe how they fit women for cholis (sari blouses). The fit of a choli is similar to a bra, although the silk or cotton choli fabric is usually less elastic.
This November I got my first cholis; it took two fittings for an expert tailor to make them fit correctly to my form factor.
Sorry to hear that... I had high hopes for Bra Theory.
Our biggest challenge was not the technology, but the underlying methodology.
We could not automate that which we did not know how to do by hand.
I like applying the inverse of this. If I don't know how to do something, I try to automate/simulate it, and this creates for me an organic path to the knowledge I seek by creating problems which can be solved. Perhaps your algorithm simply needs further refinement.
I was brash, and thought that with the right team, we could accelerate centuries of learning into six months and a trade secret
Ah. You didn't give yourself enough time. A research project like this is 2 years minimum, 10 years on the long side. But it has to be done if we are ever going to push the envelope.
Perhaps scaling down the company to just research and consulting for the time being would provide a way to continue in your spare time.
Reading the description, I though that there is enough interesting, high-level, material for a few phD thesis (algorithm, material science, industrialisation of a process, etc).
I would love it if the author found a way to keep the research effort going in an academic setting.
I think you needed more time and a more sophisticated approach. One could have used a 3D scanner and acquired the body shape and then one could parameterize it and then figure out the deformation you want to achieve from the bra -- even preview it for the customer, where do they want things to end up, and how much stress that will put on their body -- and then one could figure out the patterns to make again from the contact areas you wanted.
Basically it is a 3D problem and I think you didn't take a sophisticated approach because you are likely not knowledgable in that area.
You tried to apply tailoring to it, but tailoring is not body fitting nor shape changing as a bra is, nor is tailoring about stresses and weight distribution (which is comfort.)
It is a solvable problem, but your approach was not the correct one, it was simplistic.
Further, by utilizing generated (synthetic) data with 3d scanned human models, or generating your own with something like makehuman or daz3D, you should be able to find a way to UV unwrap a distorted sphere. I've had a lot of success with generating synthetic data like this with Blender 3D and training various neural networks (Mask RCNN / Deeplab for example) with various combinations of this synthetic and real datasets.
I genuinely thought "Bra theory" was some quantum physics theory with the bra operation somehow being central to it, and this was going to be about how that was disproved recently or something.
I guess I'm somewhat confused about the path of this company. From the post, it sounds like they didn't have any process for bra manufacturing at all, even manual one, and barely found anything like that in the end. So then, from the start the company was looking into automatic custom production of something about which they didn't have any knowledge? And the whole thing was essentially a wild shot at research for such production, from next to zero?
I mean, it wasn't my money to spend, but I'm curious as to if it's ‘normal’ now to form a startup while having only a goal and no expertise. That's a dream of every ‘idea man’ out there, including me.
I am surprised how there isn't a fixed Industry standard for bra sizing. Maybe bra sizing can learn something from Pcie,usb,sata standards.
Someone i was with for a long time used to always complain how all manufacturers are different and that even using stuff like a bra that fits(reddit thing) did not work in Asia as manufacturers here have different sizing. She still hasn't found her perfect fit size.
There definitely are standard sizes, but there is enough variation between manufacturers and between wearers that comfort can't be achieved at the level all can agree on. My wife has difficulty in finding the right bra and I have difficulty in getting the right shoe ( which you also would expect to be standardised)
The article ends with a link to https://www.reddit.com/r/ABraThatFits/, a subreddit for people looking for well-fitting bras. Just a cool little thing to know about if that's your (or your partner) situation.
Clothing tends to be cut from patterns of 2D shapes that are then sewn together. In theory if you measure certain key parameters of the customer you can adjust a standard pattern to fit them without further refinement. Imagine if you took a thin man, fat man and normal man then measured them all, and designed a pattern based on the normal man. Then found weighting’s to scale the pattern to the thin man and fat man. You could then (in a naive fashion) interpolate between these weighting’s to create patterns for every man inbetween. That would be your algorithm.
Not too well, no. Off-the-rack basically requires good luck and a good eye for how a suit's supposed to fit to find something that works well enough to still be tailored some (rather than extensively, or simply being hopeless) so it'll look alright.
Even shirts, if the sizing's not two-dimensional (trim, slim, regular, loose, or some similar range of cut types aside from just S/M/L/XL and so on—so Large Slim as a size, rather than just large, for example) you're not even gonna get close to an alright fit, most likely. Good dress shirts provide more detailed measurements, but even there, made-to-measure will give you noticeably better fit than off the rack.
In the sense of getting close to a ballpark that can be refined in later fittings it’s basically the job of a tailor. In the sense of being able to commodify it, as I understand it, no.
As well as there being a technological barrier there is also the cultural barrier in that bespoke suits mean something. I actually think the bra thing makes more sense from the POV of offering better comfort.
They were trying to design custom-fit bras automatically, based on 10 measurements of the body. But 10 measurements are too few to capture the wide variety of boobs that exist, and it was too expensive to gather ground truth examples (because you have to pay for expensive custom fit bras for a load of women) so they failed.
Regards input, getting from a user to their happy regions of a high-dimensional specification space, I wonder if improving tech might permit a richer dialog, an more interactive and iterative process?
AR is improving 3D measurement, material modeling and property inference, and VR motion and force sensing. So we might imagine a much richer input stream becoming available.
Welcome to App. A video mirror. Let's go through your bras. We'll scan the fit of each. What do you dis/like about it? Point out where. Let's apply force measurement device X over here, yes, that's it, ok, got it. Move like so. Apply manipulation like so. Adjust X. Let's do a motion scan when you do X. Does X feel like X?
Virtual access to an expert fitter via "video phone", without direct touch and manipulation, isn't ideal, but with enough tooling, might be sufficient. And has advantages, like "watch bra fit during an entire workout". Or "today was an unusual day - here's what chafed, and the current exact adjustments". Or "here's real-time and prompted reporting over a month".
I wonder if there might also be a role for inexpensive prototypes or test objects. I'm reminded of an optical trial lens set, with its very clunky eyeglass frame, into which one inserts a variety of interchangeable lenses. One might imagine buying properties of "highly adjustable" and "transparently instrumented", with "clunky" and "doesn't last".
Basically, use tech to permit an expert fitter to succeed remotely, augmenting and perhaps eventually automating them. In a setting of long-term collaboration with the user. And perhaps input-side development might be decoupled from manufactured output, by doing product recommendations?
Actually, having multiple views/angles and just capturing how the skin moves in 3d-space when forces are induced (through e.g. arm raising, jumping, or various other methods) should allow for inferring some elastic properties. This could allow detailed fitting with parametric stiffness/support trade offs.
I hope progress continues in this space for my wife and my daughter. But I'm also aware that my wife is a satisfied-enough bra user today, and I suspect many other women are too. So maybe this is a problem worth solving, but not as urgently as others... suppose I need to ask them to know for sure.
1. To scale, you must first become recruiters. And then, unless you're careful, you are become Shiva, a recruiting agency. And then you can't scale because you hired a bunch of in-house recruiters (maybe you're clever and call them "talent advocates") and are forever constrained in the best case to linear growth, growing as a function of how many recruiters you hire.
2. AI-based recruiting solutions that claim to match candidates to companies don't work for the same reason you can't use ML to engineer bras. The data isn't there. Scraping LinkedIn and GitHub doesn't do it, and then you have to bespoke "measure" a bunch of candidates. The hard part of that venture, in this market, isn't doing the ML. It's getting candidates (who have more leverage than you and don't need you) to give you interesting data about themselves.
3. "I thought that the likeliest outcome of launching is to end up like Peach/Zyrra, in which they launched their patented custom-made bra service, pivoted to a traditional lingerie product, and now sell women’s apparel loungewear. While the concept sounded promising, they were in the end unable to turn the concept commercial with the capital they received"... How many recruiting marketplaces have pivoted to do SaaS hiring assessment tools? I can think of at least 3.
Automating stuff by hand is hard. It's even harder when you don't have data and when it was never done well by hand in the first place.