Democratising Professional Bra-fitting Using Computer Vision

My name is Bella Trang Ngo - an immigrant founder Vietnam and a Royal Academy of Engineering Fellow. During my Masters in Technology Entrepreneurship (with a specialty in Retail Technology), I incubated the Brarista concept which aims at solving the problem of 80% of bra-wearers wearing ill-fitted bras.

Ill-fitted bras are associated with a variety of muscle pain, skin irritations and scarrings, poor breast health, and self-confidence concerns for bra-wearers. Ill-fitted bras have a direct correlation with the increased tendency in bra-wearers for body self-consciousness and are cited among the most popular reasons for poor sports participation among young women.

The pervasiveness of this problem is rooted in the inconvenience and inaccuracy of in-store bra-fitting, together with the inconsistency in fit across brands and styles (as there is no universal size chart or grading method). It is expensive for retailers, especially those with high staff turnover, to train new employees to fit bras professionally by eye or to have strong product knowledge, a typical training takes roughly two full-time months, if not more.

They thus stick to the measuring-tape bra-fitting method, which yields only 30% accuracy. A majority of high-street bra fitting services, therefore, recommend faulty sizing consultations, and their product recommendations have almost no applicability to one's correct fit.

This reality represents immediate market-pulled opportunities for Brarista to create a breakthrough that can bridge the gap by providing women with the experience of getting fitted by highly trained professional bra-fitters at home. We do so with our proprietary AI-enabled B2B2C software that enables bra-wearers to self-measure and shop for the correct bra fit across brands and styles - using any digital camera.

Our solution aims to solve the bra-sizing problems of the end-consumers, which ultimately solve retailers' problems.

We have been featured in an Israeli's national newspaper - Yedioth Ahronoth - titled: Brarista will revolutionise bra-fitting.

The Award will allow Brarista to continue to pioneer our R&D in this seriously underserved space and bring important resources and credibility to enable us to reach the next milestones in fundraising, scaling up the innovation, and beta-launching.