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"Before apparel became a $55 billion\u00A0category for e-commerce, critics warned that people would never shop online because they want to\u00A0try things on. Tony Hsieh\u00A0and Zappos led the charge in proving them wrong by offering free returns and exchanges. That\u2019s become the industry\u00A0standard in e-commerce, but it has costs companies oodles of money in shipping as a result. Forty\u00A0percent of online clothing purchases are returned, according to a 2013 Credit Suisse study. Fitbay, a young social shopping\u00A0startup based in New York, aims to help people shop more confidently online, even if they have abnormally long torsos.\nLike many startups, the idea sprang out of a frustrating experience from its\u00A0founder.\u00A0Christian Wylonis\u00A0is 6\u20192\u201D, a fairly average height in his native Copenhagen. But he has an \u201Cabnormally long torso\u201D and always struggled to find shirts that were long enough, he says.\nHe built\u00A0Fitbay to solve that issue by allowing people to shop based on their body type. The \u201Cdress for your body type\u201D feature has been a staple of women\u2019s magazines for decades. More recently, Drs. Phil and Oz have turned the concept of apple and pear-shaped bodies into multivitamins and diet guides.\u00A0Fitbay builds on the idea by pairing people with &amp;#8220;body doubles&amp;#8221; who share their height, weight and body shape.\nOn Fitbay.com, users identify their\u00A0arm length, torso length, and shape (hourglass, pear, cone, apple, or straight for women; broad, column, oval, triangle or muscular for men). They&amp;#8217;re\u00A0shown clothing, Pinterest-style, from Fitbay\u2019s database of two million items, all chosen and reviewed by their body doubles.\nThe company has operated in private beta for three months, adding tens of thousands of users and growing by 110% each month. It opened the site to the public yesterday.\nFitbay\u2019s consumer-facing service is meant\u00A0to help people who don\u2019t fit perfectly into standard-sized clothing. But it\u2019s also interesting to online retailers. Currently the company is making money on affiliate fees, where e-commerce sites pay Fitbay for any sales it drives.\nWylonis believes these sites would also be interested in the data Fitbay collects. For example, Fitbay knows\u00A0the favorite brand of every different body type, and it knows which brands do poorly with \u201Cthe fringes\u201D of, say, very tall or very short shoppers. Women between 5&amp;#8217;9&amp;#8243; and\u00A06&amp;#8217;1&amp;#8243; with a BMI over 32\u00A0tend to favor Old Navy, for example. Meanwhile, H&amp;amp;M is only popular with women of average height and weight, and Zara is most popular with cone-shaped women. For men who are oval-shaped (read: not in shape), Nike is most popular. Men under 5&amp;#8217;9&amp;#8243; with a BMI below 16 prefer Aeropostale; larger men wear more\u00A0Levi&amp;#8217;s. Wylonis says this information would help brands decide whether they are serving all of their potential customers and should expand into\u00A0petite or plus sizes.\nIn addition to its data, Fitbay is developing an open API so that online retailers can integrate with its recommendation engine, giving them the ability to show\u00A0shoppers the most flattering items for their body type while they shop\u00A0on a retailer&amp;#8217;s site. \u201CWe want to become the global authority at doing this,\u201D Wylonis\u00A0says.\nTo help it expand, Fitbay has raised $2 million in new seed funding from\u00A0Steadfast Venture Capital and Creandum,\u00A0a Stockholm-based firm which was an early backer of\u00A0Spotify. Now that the twelve-person company, based in New York, has exited beta-mode, it will focus on user acquisition."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://fortune.com/2014/06/11/fitbays-social-network-for-body-types-raises-2-million/>