I have five pairs of shoes at home that fit me well. You probably do too. When two people share the same size in a model, they are the same fit, and if you scale that up to a million you get a map of well fitting sizes. That is the simple premise that we started building GetSize on.
As we started our journey we went looking at the current state of the business, and here are some things we found.
Shops cannot keep up
A shop sells shoes from hundreds of brands. Every brand publishes its own size charts, and those charts change from year to year. Mapping each product to the chart its brand publishes for it, and keeping that mapping current, is a large amount of work that never finishes.
So it does not get done. Europe's biggest e-retailer serves a generic size chart for most of their shoes. We have seen stores serving charts that the brand replaced years ago. Plenty of stores publish no chart at all.
I do not blame any single actor in the chain. It is too big a job to do properly alongside everything else a shop has to do. And that is a handful of stores out of millions selling shoes online. With the cost of returns factored into pricing structures, it's unfortunately the consumer that has to pay the ultimate price. Environmental impact and precious time lost.
A size chart does not say much
Even a correct, current chart is a lossy thing. Most of them give you one number per size, the length in millimetres. Sometimes you also get a width. You get nothing about the shape of the last, the room over the instep, or how the material gives after a week.
Two shoes can list the same length in the same size and fit you differently. There are many reasons for this, one being that there are multiple factories involved. Each with its own procedures and materials that ultimately impacts fit.
The shoes you own know more
I own five pairs that fit me. Say you own two of them, and they fit you too. This means that our fit preferences are close enough that a third pair fitting me will probably fit you. It does not matter if our feet are not identical. The sizes represent a preferred feeling on our feet.
In order to build our map we need a lot of crowd-sourced data, as without it our product can't exist. So in order to provide value to our users on day 1 we've worked hard to collect the official size chart each brand publishes for each model. Now every size you add to your shoe rack, and every recommendation you request, will ultimately help another shopper out there. That is our goal.
Where this goes
Sizing should be solved once, in one place, and then be available wherever you shop. In a shop, on a website, or through whatever AI agent ends up doing the buying for you.
Thank you for being a part of this effort.
Best regards,
Thomas