Perspiration popping out across a dimly lit forehead, the online apparel shopper crawls through a tangled Web of measured ambiguity and misinformed sizing specifications. Behind a veiled eternity of breathlessness, and with more concerted effort than a single lion stalking a herd of abnormally giant angry caribou, he keys in the life-blood of his credit card and clicks "BUY."

Three days later the clothes arrive: The shirts are too small, the pants are too tight, the jacket is too baggy, and the boxer shorts look like they were intended to stop a raging water buffalo.

TheRightSize, Inc. hopes to alleviate this senseless hunt, all too common at apparel Web sites, using a proprietary "fit technology" the company says can accurately determine a shopper's not-so-virtual sizing attributes in real-time. The Burlingame-based application service provider (ASP) announced a series of heavyweight subscribers to its service today, including apparel giant JC Penney, SmartCasual.com, and Puma International.

"Our solution is very simple," explains Krishnan Menon, President, COO & Co-founder of TheRightSize. "We provide retailers with an ASP size-engine we call the Rosetta Stone, which will actually recommend to customers what they should buy. The engine bases its recommendations on styles and sizes those customers have previously purchased and already know they like."

Using what Menon refers to as a "simple closet profiling process", RightSize integrates a series of pop-up windows onto a site that record apparel-specs from each new customer (item number, brand, style, fabric, size, and personal rating of items the user already owns or is familiar with). That information is then fed into a complex dynamic clustering engine (similar to the clustering used by the government to predict missile trajectories!) that recommends new brands or designs a user might also appreciate.

ri "Take a user at JCPenney.com," says Menon. "JCPenney has thousands of different brands, but maybe a user is only familiar with one of them. Our model will compare the attributes of what that user likes about that one brand, and then recommend other brands that possess similar attributes. Conversely, we can implement this onto one brand's site, say the Gap.com, and it can be used to recommend other styles within that brand's offering."

In trying to fit into the size-related marketplace, RightSize hopes to mend the un-hemmed inefficiencies that, according to research firm Forrester Research, already have 87% of US consumers in stitches over dissatisfaction with purchasing clothes online.

Size DOES Matter

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"The main reason people return clothes because they don't fit is because 'fit,' in fact, has very little to do with size," explains Menon. "Your size might be completely different from how you'd actually like to be fit. Take, for example, the 18 year-old kid with the 28-inch waist...who wears 38-inch pants around his hips."

In building its sizing-engine, TheRightSize sounds more like an underground government testing center than a means to find comfy socks. Menon says the company integrated several hundred "fashion parameters" into its database, and then literally sifted through thousands of products from different retail establishments. That information was used to create a human body model in RightSize's artificial intelligence database, which in turn acts as a model for the Rosetta Stone.

"Despite the complexity, the only integration a client needs to worry about accounts for how we link to each item in their inventory," assures Menon. "Since all that requires is essentially the inventory list, we can get a client up and running in as little as two or three weeks."

RightSize clients pay a basic sign-on installation fee (waved for early customers), and between 20-85 cents for each unique recommendation fed to a user. The company also provides real-time reports to retailers on what sizes are being used within certain demographics, as well as brand reporting indicating what is most popular within a product line.

"Goldman Sachs predicts $34 billion in online apparel returns by 2003, up $6 billion from last year," says Menon. "With each return costing a retailer upwards of $15 each, even raising the satisfaction rate a few percentage points is great news to our clients."

With the first sites expected to go live in September, Menon says the company will eventually branch from apparel into all levels of size-related merchandise, including footwear and sporting goods equipment. All told, that's a $3 trillion market in this county alone.

No sweat!