The original master plan behind the Zozosuit seemed innovative, appealing and intriguing. Devised by Yusaku Maezawa, founder and CEO of ZoZo (the billionaire is more famous for his lunar tourism passion as he's supposed to be the first private passenger on Elon Musk's SpaceX mission), behind Japan's fashion e-commerce website retailer site Zozotown (operated by Start Today Co., Ltd.), the suit's tagline alluringly stated "custom-fit clothing for a size free world".
Indeed the Zozosuit offered people with all sorts of body shapes who usually struggle to find clothes that fit, the chance to get bespoke clothes. The project consisted in a body marker recognition gadget, a black skin-tight bodysuit (top and bottom) covered in white dots (300-400 markers, though a previous version was supposed to have a stretchable sensor system) all over it.
Using the product also seemed easy: customers ordered it, tried it on, posed for photos in front of their phones running the Zozo app taking body measurements and uploaded them on the Zozo site. They could then proceed to order their clothes – including T-shirts, blouses and jeans (all at an affordable price, starting indeed from around $22) – that would perfectly suit to their bodies.
In a nutshell, this was a celebration of body uniqueness, almost Haute Couture (albeit without the embellishments and refined techniques of high fashion...) for ordinary people. The possibility of never returning again ill-fitting garments to your local store or e-commerce retailer was rather alluring and the bodysuit soon turned into a novelty item: in May last year 1 million people ordered it, often sharing their pictures on social media.
Yet things didn't go as expected: at the end of January, Zozo's CEO had to apologise about the Zozosuit fitting system and announced the company was cutting its operating profit forecast for the year to 26.5 billion yen ($243.7 million), down from its previous estimate of 40 billion yen.
According to Maezawa there were several reasons behind this failure: first of all Zozo saw the suits as a publicity opportunity and didn't charge for them, hoping to get a demand for made-to-measure clothes. Yet, the response was bad as many people ordered the suits, but not nearly as many purchased clothes (mind you, this may have something to do with the rather limited offer of designs on the site: fashion has super fast rhythms and you can't expect to get massive orders for shirts and jeans that may fit you like a glove, but still look basic and average, can you?); those who did order the clothes complained about fit often leaving unfavourable reviews, and others didn't even bother uploading their measurements with the Zozo app. As a consequence, the company was stuck with the huge cost of distributing the suits without seeing returns.
You wonder if the Zozosuit was just a publicity stunt, if there is more behind this story or if the suit was just a costly stratagem to harvest personal data and feed a machine-learning algorithm. After all, in November Maezawa announced the suit was going to be scrapped by March this year, explaining the company had gathered enough customer data to make clothes using just a customer’s height and weight (but is it really possible to make proper bespoke clothes just taking care of these two measurements?).
While the idea seemed innovative and could potentially revolutionalise the clothing business, it was more or less an epic fail. At the same time if millions of people ordered the suit, it means that there is a market for made-to-measure affordable clothes. But first technology needs to be improved: if you read the negative reviews written by those consumers who actually ordered the clothes, you start thinking that human hands are still much better than a body mapping suit linked to an app. So, the failure of the Zozosuit may be the revenge of the traditional tailors and dressmakers and, at least for the time being, if you can't afford having your clothes made by a professional, there's just one way to make the clothes fit – learn how to make your own garments or learn how to alter what you buy or what you already have in your wardrobe.
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