Outfitable founder Dima Kfouri. Image: NDRC
Our start-up of the week, Outfitable, helps women find the clothes that best suit their body shape.
“Outfitable matches women with the clothes that fit them best and outfits that suit their body shape, based on their personal measurements,” explained Outfitable founder Dima Kfouri, a Dublin-based entrepreneur of Canadian and Lebanese descent.
“We all come in different shapes and sizes, but Outfitable was set up so that every woman can find the fit that flatters.”
Kfouri is a two-time Cannes Lion-awarded strategic planner, with a background in marketing, mapping out the user journey and customer acquisition strategy for many B2C international brands.
The market
“There’s great ambiguity in the fashion industry when it comes to sizing,” Kfouri explained.
“Women range anything from three to four sizes, depending on the brand, with varied sizing charts a frustration for many.
“Worse still, 40pc of all items of clothing bought online are returned, with wrong fit the primary problem. This costs a fortune for retailers, as consumers waste countless hours ordering, returning and then waiting for the right item to finally arrive.”
An entirely free experience, Outfitable’s website allows customers to provide personal measurements, shop the best brands to suit their shape and size, and find the perfect outfit for the perfect occasion.
The founder
“Once I researched the concept of Outfitable, I realised the level of interest and need for it in the market,” said Kfouri.
“It was the perfect time for me to switch from building other companies’ brands to building a brand and company of my own.
“My expertise is in understanding the product-market fit, uncovering behavioural insights, mapping out the user journey and crafting the most relevant messages at key touch points – all of them transferrable skills I enjoy applying to Outfitable.”
The technology
As Kfouri rightly points out, fashion should be a source of confidence, not anxiety.
“We specifically adopted a customer-centric approach to our new website build,” she explained.
“We started with on-boarding 16 premium high-street brands with their size guides and products, including Ted Baker, Coast, Reiss, LK Bennett and many more.
“We then created algorithms that take your measurements and output your ‘best fit brands’. We can tell you your body shape, as well as where to shop for what item, in what size.
“You can then also shop stylist-recommended outfits for different occasions, that suit your specific shape and figure. We created this new customised way of shopping for clothes online, which revolves around each and every user’s personal measurements and proportions.”
Kfouri said that Outfitable is a virtual stylist digitised to scale internationally.
“We aspire to deliver a personalised experience similar to Netflix, where we leverage data, usage, purchasing history, habits and preferences, machine-learning technology and collaborative filtering to serve up exactly what each and every woman would want and look good in,” she said.
On trend
Outiftable launched in the UK late last year and had a great Christmas season,” said Kfouri.
“We enjoy double the industry average conversion and session duration rates.
“Most of our users are really busy professional women above 35, with changing body shapes and significant disposable income, who find it difficult to order what fits and suits them best. Everything we recommend is the right size for their measurements and the right style for their shape.
“Going forward, we’re looking to work more closely with retailers to further help them decrease returns [and] increase conversions, engagement, average transaction value, lifetime value and loyalty.”
In terms of funding, Kfouri said the company plans to start raising investment later in the year.
A neat fit
Observing the Irish start-up scene, she believes it is tough for start-ups to attract sufficient seed funding.
“It’s a bit of a catch-22 when early-stage start-ups need pre-seed investment to gain traction, but need to prove traction to gain pre-seed investment.
“It was a big challenge in the early days, which is why I’m thankful for NDRC’s Launchpad accelerator that gave us the needed support to get Outfitable up and running.
“The Irish start-up scene is small enough that you get to know it very well – all the players, all the support services, all the peers, etc. There are plenty of people to reach out to, and most are super accessible.”
Her advice to fellow founders is to learn and fail quickly.
“In our line of work, it’s expected that you put in long hours and weekends. But our time is our most precious resource, and I feel it’s more important to be efficient, to work smarter rather than just harder. Learn and fail quickly, find efficiencies by measuring everything, find the low-hanging fruit and easy wins, and, most importantly, learn to prioritise.
“When a team is looking to you for leadership, that’s the most useful skill to have that allows you to delegate and manage everyone’s time wisely.”
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