Two companies tackling a problem with online retail – finding clothing that fit when you’re not able to try items on yourself – are today announcing a merger. London-based Fits.me, the developer of virtual fitting room solutions for e-commerce retailers and New York-based Clothes Horse, a data-driven recommendations tool that helps shoppers find fitting clothes they’ll love, are teaming up in order to establish a larger footprint in the industry as they both eye international expansions.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but we understand that money did exchange hands, and that technically Clothes Horse was acquired by Fits.me though it’s not being characterized as that.
Fits.me is actually the larger company in terms of dollars raised and full-time employees, but is similar in size to Clothes Horse when it comes to the number of clients. Today, Clothes Horse has around 30 retailer partners, and combined the two companies will now reach 50 retailers and have a team of 60 employees.
There isn’t much, if any, overlap between the two companies as both retailers currently offer different products.
Fits.me’s “Virtual Fitting Room” aims to mimic the in-store fitting experience online, by giving shoppers a visualization of how an item of clothing would really look on their body. Meanwhile, Clothes Horse uses a combination of data about a person’s measurements (height, weight, etc.), and details about what kind of clothing they like and matches that up with the actual measurements of brands’ clothing in order to point shoppers to the right items.
Because of each’s location, Fits.me tends to serve clients in the U.K. and E.U. while Clothes Horse’s clients are largely in the U.S. and North America, including Ministry of Supply, Frank & Oak, and Gant. It’s also running a pilot program with Macy’s and has other retailers on board it’s not permitted to name. Fits.me, meanwhile, works with the European arm of HUGO BOSS, Thomas Pink, IconStyle, and several others.
The merger came about as both were looking to expand into each other’s markets and saw that it may make better sense for them to combine forces. In the near-term future, however, both will retain their same names and will focus on integrating their product line-ups and test out what their clients will respond to. While neither are disclosing revenue, Clothes Horse co-founder Vik Venkatraman says that his company sells its software on the SaaS (software-as-a-service) model, with pricing that starts at $500/month, where most retailers are in the “couple thousand” range and some are on the high-end enterprise plans.
Clothes Horse, incidentally, had only raised seed funding a couple of years ago, and has been running of profits since. This year, it rolled out a new analytics product for retailers that offers then insights that help them with inventory planning, merchandising decisions, competitive intelligence and more.
“We’re going to work some of what Fits.me does well on the visualization side and work that into our business,” says Venkatraman, hinting that Clothes Horse had also experimented in this area before the merger as well.
The two hope to have their products better integrated by Q1 2015.
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