Launch and early success

Launched in 2013 Fitbay has received a great deal of media attention for their service and rightly so. In the day and age with information overload and lack of time, a tool that can take away some of the stress from decision-making is always welcome to our app toolboxes. American Forbes described Fitbay as a promising Nordic startup, which “eliminates the frustration when you have to find clothes,” because you automatically matched with people who have the same style and size.

User count has also proven Fitbay a success. Back in April the number of Fitbay active users was growing between 40 and 60 per cent a month. And only two weeks ago the company reported a quarter of a million users.

Financing

The potential of the service was also noticed by the investors. In total Fitbay has attracted over € 1.6 million (12 million DKK) in venture capital from Steadfast Venture Capital, Swedish Creandum and also Jesper Buch. However, while the initial capital was sufficient for keeping the company going, Fitbay didn’t manage to get more money to continue it’s operations in Denmark, reporting over a million DKK in loss over the last year and consequently filing for bankruptcy this fall, reported in Finans.dk.

A partner at Creandum Martin Hauge comments the situation:

“The company performed not as we would have liked it, but those are the terms of the venture market. It is the risks we have to face when investing in startups.”

The future

Fitbay ApS is a subsidiary of US Fitbay Inc in Delaware, USA, which is a holding company. This means that it is the Danish development office with 12 employees that went bankrupt. And since the holding company is the one that owns the rights to the website, it is still possible to run parts of the business even if you are a bankrupt, according to the law. You can reach out to bankruptcy lawyers for legal advice when going through bankruptcy. Reid & Hellyer are top-notch bankruptcy lawyers who have been serving Southern California for more than 125 years! And, therefore, according to Christian Wylonis, the founder and CEO, Fitbay in the US will continue to run. The rest of the company’s future is so far unclear. But we are hoping to hear some good news in the times to come! You can talk to Marc Brown, P.A. in Fort Lauderdale lawyer to help you figure out the legal matters.

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“The ambition of Fitbay is to provide consumers with an understanding of how the clothes actually look at a body like theirs. And thus contribute to fewer misleding sales practices. We expect that we can halve the proportion of returned merchandises if online shoppers are using Fitbay” says CEO and co- founder Christian Wylonis.

Fitbays is meant to help people who doesn’t fit perfectly in a standard size to find suitable clothes. But the service is also interesting for online retailers; Fitbay is sending users worth millions of euros to affiliates, where e-commerce sites pay Fitbay for any sales it drives.

Fast growing

The Danish company with base in New York has undeniably been successful since its launch in 2014. According to Mattermark, the world’s largest database regarding growth, Fitbay is the third fastest growing startup in the world regarding fashion / e-commerce. In Scandinavia, Fitbay is the number one on this list.

In addition, Fitbay was appointed the ninth coolest tech startup in Scandinavia at Business Insider top-24 list, which also included Spotify and Angry Birds. Fitbay has really made an impressing development in just one year after the launch!

Today, the company has hundreds of thousands of users, primarily in the US, but also in Scandinavia and the UK. These users have access to more than five million products from 15,000 brands, which means a lot of inspiration for a bunch of different body types.

Update: We incorrectly stated that Fitbay made revenue in the millions from affiliates in a previous version. This was due to a missunderstanding.

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Fitbay has since it start in May 2013 quickly established itself in the international entrepreneurial scene. The new investment, led by Steadfast Venture Capital, will be used to increase product team in Copenhagen and the commercial team in New York, where Fitbay recently opened office.

Opening up their beta

Fitbay works with a new way of making sure people buy clothes in the right sizes online, and thus minimizing returns for eCommerce companies. This service has been in closed beta so far, but today Fitbay also open their public beta.

Fitbay aims to eliminate the guessing game and the uncertainty of whether a garment will fit or not when shopping online, by displaying only products that actually fit the individual user. Fitbay is a new type of social network that segmenting users with similar body types and style preferences in small groups. With relativly simple information the services makes it possible to provide a personalized page with brands and products recommended by other with similar bodies – without having to go through the effort to measure themselves. The idea behind Fitbay came from the founder’s personal experience with buying clothes on the internet.

“We are humbly overwhelmed by the strong interest we have received. Using social shopping we crowdsource information about size and fit from thousands of unique body measures, and thereby display only products that fit – without ever having to use a tape measure.” says Christian Wylonis founder & CEO

With return rates of clothes being as high as 50% for some retailers, the problem of geting the right fit has a large market value. This, combined with problems that sizes differ a lot between different clothing brands and are not optimised for different body types, makes clothing in the right sizes a big issue for retailers.

U.S. investment and more focus on U.S. market

Fitbay says they have always focused on the U.S. market. Over 40% of Fitbays users are Americans and it was therefore a priority to get a U.S. invest on board. The Swedish venture capital fund Creandum is a more established player in the Nordic entrepreneurial environment, with multiple investments in startup here, such as Vivino and Planday.

“We are very proud to invest in Fitbay for the second time in 6 months. User activity on the growth and Fitbay has been very impressive and we look forward to following the development over the next year. We invest because we are convinced that Fitbay has the same potential as Spotify” said Martin Hauge, General Partner at Creandum

If you are interested in the public beta by Fitbay, then get into contact with them.

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”We are proud to support the team behind Fitbay.com in their vision to solve the biggest pain in online clothes shopping today.” says Martin Hauge, General Partner at Creandum

The investment, which is $ 400 000 (€ 290 000), got the startup a lot of attention. Both TechCrunch and multiple Scandinavian tech sites have written about it.

Fitbay recommends clothes in the right size without using measuring tape or analysis software. Instead it connects people of similar body shapes into virtual networks based on their height, weight, and body types. This creates the basis for a social shopping experience where inspiration and discovery happens with your body doubles. It is both a social network and a crowdsourcing site for finding the right clothes.

”Today it is not convenient to buy clothes online. A large part of purchases result in a trip to the post office in order to send the product back to the store. Customers do not want to risk buying clothes in the wrong size and as a result they stop buying clothes online altogether. We want to bring convenience back to online clothes shopping by helping users find clothes that fit both in size and style.” says Christian Wylonis, Founder & CEO

With return on clothes being as high as 50% for some online retailers, finding a good solution to this problem is a good business opportunity. Multiple startups have tried, but Fitbays unique take on the problem is a novel way of doing it.

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