Fits.me takes 5 million pounds in Series A funding

Fits.me, the virtual fitting room software firm, which counts Adidas and Hugo Boss among its clients, has netted 5 million pounds through its Series A funding round to help develop its services. The London-based Fits.me, has added Conor Venture

Partners, Fostergate Holdings Limited and The Entrepreneur’s Fund as backers, alongside existing investor SmartCap.

Previously, in May 2009 and August 2010, the company received total seed and early-stage investment of just under 1.75 million pounds from Smartcap and angel investors, as well as 500,000 pounds worth of grants.

Virtual

fitting room Fits.me adds investors

Fits.me, which develops, markets and operates virtual fitting room solutions on a software-as-a-service basis for online clothing retailers, plans to use the new funding to support accelerated sales and marketing programmes including international expansion into the France, Germany, other EU countries and the USA. Additionally, the firm is continuing to scale up its operations to meet predicted demand.

Heikki Haldre, co-founder and chief executive at Fits.me, said: “We are in a market that has started to move very quickly as retailers look to overcome their high street difficulties by focusing on online performance. It should be clear to everyone that we mean to do very good business by helping online clothing retailers to solve one of their most pressing problems.”

The demand for retailers to overcome low online conversion rates and high garment returns has helped the growth of Fits.me services, as the software firm claims its service helps to boost revenues and profitability of online clothing retailers by overcoming the online ‘fit’ problem. In 2012, the overall proportion of garment sales from online channels was 14-15 percent, according to Mintel, it is the worry of ‘poor fit’ from shopping online that puts off shoppers.

The Fits.me service, which is used by many retailers including Avenue32, Pretty Green, Superdry and LK Bennett, showcases how the garments will look on shoppers, no matter what their body size and shape, simply by asking them for just a few basic measurements. According to Fits.me, online retailers using the service have improved their conversion rates by up to 62 percent compared to shoppers using a traditional size chart and a reduction in returns for reasons of fit of up to 77 percent.

Manu Mäkelä, founding partner at Conor Venture Partners, added: “While large swathes of retailing already takes place online, there are sectors for which the real online growth has yet to come.

“Apparel is chief among those sectors, primarily because buying clothes is such a subjective process – most obviously when it comes to ‘fit’. Fits.me has a sophisticated solution that works, delivers provable results, is easy for retailers to deploy and has been signed up by a growing band of respected retailers and brands, on an international basis.”