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Better bra sizing.
It's an idea I've been kicking around for a few days. The technical and marketing-based obstacles towards getting it to work have turned me off pursuing it, but I figured it was worth sharing.
I work with operational databases for a luxury fashion retailer, and bra sizing as it currently exists (back size + cup size) makes absolutely no sense. I will sometimes ask female friends to explain how the size given for a garment can possibly be of any use in determining comfort and fit. Their answer: it doesn't.
Their actual answer tends to be a rant about inconsistency between product ranges and how contemporary bra sizing is next to useless. A couple have been both eloquent and insightful. A few times a year I'll have an idea I get excited about turning into some sort of web-based service, and in spite of its silly-sounding nature, this one is easily the one that's had the most philanthropic weight behind it.
The idea: a website containing a comprehensive list of commercially available bras. Users sign up, locate bras they own (or have tried on) and rate them along various measures of comfort/fit/support, etc. The service then locates clusters of users with similar preferences to them (exact method of analysis still up for debate, but a few likely candidates stand out), and suggests specific sizes and ranges that would meet their needs.
There are three sides to this. The first is users getting the service described above. The second is the option to license out the size/fit data to interested third parties, such as manufacturers and retailers, which would probably be the most sizeable revenue stream. The third is the possibility of using the data to produce a better sizing scheme that more accurately tackles the real-world problem.
I see two main problems with the idea. The first is encouraging user uptake (convincing women to spend time inputting details about their underwear into a website). The second, which is related, is giving them incentive to do so without the recommendation algorithm in place. I have no idea if k-NN or spectral partitioning or probabilistic classifiers or regression analysis will be any good at all in carving up the data appropriately, and I won't know until I get a sizeable set of data to develop against. There'd need to be an existing service provision for the users to encourage them to sign up and provide the data before the interesting work even begins. An existing comprehensive list of commercially available bras complete with a flat non-super-stats-enhanced rating system might be enough to get the ball rolling.
I should reiterate that I'm unlikely to pursue this idea. While I have a background in web dev, data analysis and technical fashion retail, I'm far from an expert in any of them. Still, if anyone wants to convince me otherwise, give me more reasons why it's a bad idea, or steal it outright, please go ahead.
I add to this the idea of the half-bra.
Anecdotal evidence from female friends suggests that if you can make bra sizing not suck, you will indeed make life quite a bit better for quite a lot of people.
It seems to touch upon an incredibly raw nerve. Many of my friends are quite thoughtful and verbose people anyway, but I get the impression some of them could talk for hours about their dissatisfaction with bra sizing. If nothing else, it's given me a good heuristic for spotting potential consumer interest: follow the moaning.
You might be able to get a certain number of people to sign up just by making a credible effort to pursue a fully general solution at all. Work out ballpark figures for how much it would cost to construct a sufficiently detailed topological model, gather a starting dataset, etc., add it all up, put your proposal on Kickstarter.
http://www.bratabase.com/pages/shapes/
When an idea is so brilliant you're amazed nobody has thought of it before, consider the alternate hypothesis that there's a specialized field of study you simply don't know about.
So specialised that in spite of kicking this idea around for the better part of the month, I still didn't come across it.
What about a Maker-Bra, a CNC designed for rendering articles of clothing out of base fabrics and plastics?
Oooh, great idea!
Something that requires less data to get off the ground:
Just try and figure out what reasonable bra size measurements might be, measure those, and tell people how to find their own measurements so that they can just buy bras that fit.
That presupposes that there's an actual set of measurements that would be reasonable, but I think that that's fairly likely.
There's an underlying question to the whole endeavour: are conventional bra sizes doing a good job of a hard task, or a bad job of an easy task? Is it relatively simple to classify the shapes of women's bodies, and standard back/cup sizes are the wrong tool, or is aforementioned classification really hard, and standard sizing is doing a sterling job of it?
I suspect it's probably neither, and standard sizing is doing a terrible job of a hard task. I tried making a few simple topological models, and it turns out breasts are actually quite complicated, but there's no reason to assume the standard sizing scheme is optimal for the task, so gains can definitely be made somewhere. I don't think just trying to figure them out is an option, though. It's a question of how women's bodies categorise, and the only way to answer that is with the data.
Presumably better matching would lead to more sales, so the standard revenue stream from something like that is a cut from the redeemed discount coupons offered to the customers by the retailers or manufacturers through the matching site.