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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 reading and being impressed by some of the previous blog posts; commiserations, I'm sorry it didn't work out.<p>Archive link to the post, is down at the moment: <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20191223180103/http://bratheory.com/hiatus/" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20191223180103/http://bratheory.c...</a>
> 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.<p>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 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21850831" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21850831</a> : it seems fabric remains hard.
As a naive guy who is looking at this straight on with admittedly limited reflection, it makes sense that this would be a complicated space:<p>* You've got a data capture problem - how do women securely and privately obtain and transmit shape data in a way that is culturally acceptable?<p>* You've got a modeling problem - how do you determine how much structural support is required on a case by case basis?<p>* You've got a manufacturing tech problem - how do you create bespoke products cheaply?<p>* You've got a culture problem - how do you address the fact that a large portion of the population is by definition going to be smaller than average?<p>There are probably a series of other things I'm not thinking of but each of these are non-trivial.
I hope the effort to distill bra-fitting into an algorithm won't be thrown out. Perhaps they could be donated to FreeSewing.org ?<p>Full disclosure: I am the FreeSewing maintainer
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.<p>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.<p><i>Our biggest challenge was not the technology, but the underlying methodology.</i><p><i>We could not automate that which we did not know how to do by hand.</i><p>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.<p><i>I was brash, and thought that with the right team, we could accelerate centuries of learning into six months and a trade secret</i><p>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.<p>Perhaps scaling down the company to just research and consulting for the time being would provide a way to continue in your spare time.
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.<p>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.<p>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.)<p>It is a solvable problem, but your approach was not the correct one, it was simplistic.<p>It is an incredibly interesting problem though.
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.
Related from a year ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18599728" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18599728</a>
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?<p>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.<p>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.
The article ends with a link to <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ABraThatFits/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/ABraThatFits/</a>, 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.
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?<p>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.<p>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?<p>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".<p>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".<p>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?
I wonder if it's possible to scale measuring by replacing measuring process by making a 3d scan (several versions - regular, with arms raised, etc.).<p>Then this data could be mapped to a simplified model which, in turn, could be used to figure out measurements of the bra.
There's a tension between solving the problem perfectly and burning your first customers to gather data, fund development, and iterate.<p>The best product startups have a both curious perfectionist scientist and a commercial sales person working together.
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.