Buying clothing online during the pandemic was a painful journey that we all had to endure. Online shopping is full of doom scrolling and shopping carts that will never be purchased, because it always comes down to one thing: size. Without the ability to saunter into your favourite store and touch, see, or try on any clothes, shopping became more like gambling. With stores having closed fitting rooms and most Canadians resorting to online shopping for safety reasons, it became more important than ever to understand exactly what you were buying. That’s where SizeWize comes in. 

Launching amid the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Shawn Miller and Arpit Bhanot founded SizeWize, a go-to app for small and medium businesses who sell apparel online. Doing away with impractical and traditional size guides, SizeWize reinvented the wheel with AI driven sizing recommendations. Built as an application for Shopify with plans to integrate with other e-commerce platforms later this year, SizeWize collects your customer’s personal measurements and fit preferences to recommend a size option that is almost guaranteed to be the perfect fit. They use a result-based algorithm to compare thousands of shoppers’ sizing preferences to eliminate the guesswork for your customers, ensure happy consumers, and most importantly, avoid an inaccurate fit. 

The conception of SizeWize came from a needs-based problem affecting many online shoppers worldwide. Founder Shawn Miller had been purchasing his clothing from the same companies for years until the push for local support became prevalent. In his wish to support local London businesses, he purchased clothing in the same listed size from three different local brands and noticed the drastic fit variation. With that problem in mind, the young, recently graduated founders started tracking down industry results and found that 91% of people who shop online are dissatisfied with the fit. With local and small businesses at the forefront of their ideas, they found that functional size-guide applications were only available for large grossing companies, leaving 4.6 million clothing brands in North America under the income barrier for these apps.  

Currently in Alpha testing with over 50 brands, SizeWize is on its way to being an accessible app through Shopify by early fall of 2021. Alongside making big strides in the algorithm and AI world of sizing, they are also making the app accessible for smaller businesses to utilize. Miller remarks on the importance of supporting small and local, stating, “We’re building SizeWize as a small tech company helping small retail brands, local cities, and mom-and-pop shops around Canada”. 

Large-scale companies that copy and paste their styles and colours and have retail space in every major mall have been eating up the online consumer space in apparel. With a recent push for more small business shopping and the pandemic bringing local businesses into the limelight, this application is the finishing touch for small and medium e-commerce stores to guarantee customer satisfaction when it comes to fit.  

Small businesses are seeing the side effects of this pandemic more than anyone, Miller states, “They’re seeing three times more e-commerce returns than brick and mortar stores, and that’s entirely due to the lack of the fitting room experience”. For small businesses, this app is an irreplaceable accessibility tool to replace your FAQ page and influx of emails asking, “will this fit me?”.  Delivering a fitting-room experience to online retailers, SizeWize is empowering brands to convert their shoppers and see a growing bottom-line. With other incentives like reduced return rates, secured data, and sustainability action, they are moulding a new world of shopping experiences online.  SizeWize is currently launched for alpha testing with the expectation to be launched as a Shopify-user app by this fall. Learn more and download the app here.