Who has not known that frustration of having to send back a garment or a pair of shoes, as soon as they arrive from La Poste, because of a sizing error? To avoid these mishaps when ordering online, the start-up Fitizzy has developed a particularly intelligent algorithm. It recommends to the internet user the size that suits them best, based on their measurements and on the patterns of different brands.
Initially dedicated to consumer ready-to-wear, and a partner of major brands such as Promod, Naf Naf, Celio, Cyrillus or Etam for lingerie, Fitizzy has for the past two years been opening up to the professional sector.
This B2B offering became possible after Fitizzy’s applications were moved to the AWS Cloud and after the adoption of the microservices provided by this Cloud provider. During this strategic step, the start-up was supported by the Premaccess team technically, but also in business terms. Christophe Del Fabbro, CTO of Fitizzy, took a full part in this migration.
In this interview, he looks back at the genesis of Fitizzy and at the offering it provides. He also explains to us how the application was deployed on AWS in order to accelerate the development of this innovative company.
Fitizzy, a size recommendation solution
With Fitizzy, ready-to-wear leaders reduce their return rates
More adaptable and more flexible architectures thanks to AWS
A step-by-step migration
Using data to improve e-commerce services
The Premaccess pluses: analysing the challenges, controlling costs and AWS expertise
Next challenge: offering Fitizzy in SaaS mode
With Fitizzy, ready-to-wear leaders reduce their return rates
“Fitizzy was born in 2013 thanks to Sébastien Ramel and Gaultier Monier. When they were students, both of them were always afraid of buying clothes online, because they were never sure of ordering the right size. They looked for tools to solve this problem. They found nothing. That is how they came up with the idea of building this application.
From the very start of this project, we devoted ourselves to the ready-to-wear sector. Our first objective was to help our partners recommend the right size to their users. On their e-commerce site, and more precisely on their product pages, we install our plugin via an action button. When they click on this button, users have to enter several morphological details (their sex, their age, their height and their weight). This data is cross-referenced with the brand’s technical information in order to provide them with a recommendation of the most accurate size.
Initially, Fitizzy provided users with size recommendations on a given product. Now we go further, by offering product recommendations based on your body shape. Today, we make these services available to more than fifty brands in the clothing and footwear sector.
This application clearly gives the internet user confidence when buying online – they are less afraid of getting the size wrong. It also considerably reduces customer returns following an online order. These returns, free for the consumer, are very costly for the retailer.
Alongside that, for the past two years we have opened up a new market dedicated to workwear. More and more companies need to clothe their employees. Until now, these companies went through firms that send out agents to take each employee’s measurements on site.
To reduce these travel costs, we had the idea of creating a platform dedicated to taking measurements. On this platform, employees fill in a form and tell us about their body shape. Based on the information collected, we produce size recommendations. As a result, there are fewer errors in the number of models to produce, and handling and delivery costs are reduced.
In this sector, we work in particular with Bragard, a leader in professional clothing for kitchens, food trades and hospitality, and with CWS-Boco, a specialist in worksite clothing.”
More adaptable and more flexible architectures thanks to AWS
“Our application moved to the AWS Cloud more than two years ago. There was a strong case for taking that step because, at the time, we were still working on hosted servers. As a result, we did not have all the flexibility that AWS and their managed services offer. Designing new architectures was more laborious and took more time. And the result was often more costly than what AWS can give us today.”
“When you migrate an application to AWS, three options are open to you.
- Either you take the existing setup and try to fit it into AWS as it stands. That is possible. This is the “lift and shift” method. But it is expensive, because you do not use the native features of the Cloud.
- Or you rethink the whole architecture and the code of your application in order to make the most of the native features of the Cloud. This is what is called “refactoring”.
- In our case, we chose a middle way: we opted for the “replatform”. This method makes it possible to take advantage of the basic features of the Cloud and to optimise costs, without committing a high level of resources. So, during this migration, backed by the Premaccess team, we took the time to prepare the main building blocks of our application before moving into AWS, avoiding a simple “copy and paste”.
We have :
- the central core, standalone, dedicated to our API.
- then our services, the plugin, our applications, the platforms, everything that is “web”. These elements are independent of the central core.
- Finally, our databases. ”
Using data to improve e-commerce services
“Data management is crucial within Fitizzy, in particular to improve our recommendations. So, when we moved to AWS, we adopted Amazon Kinesis and the following chain of services: S3 + Athena + QuickSight, with the support of the Premaccess teams.
Kinesis is a managed service for collecting, sorting and analysing strategic data from our partners’ merchant sites. For each of our clients, we analyse page views, clicks on our action button, the opening of our plugin, the content of our recommendation, adding to basket, purchase or basket abandonment. By cross-referencing all this information, we aim to refine our tools.
All this data is made available to our clients through the Amazon QuickSight service. Via a dedicated Dashboard, each partner finds all this data in the form of charts. These KPIs can be used by their marketing department to improve the performance of their e-commerce site. They can also be of interest to their pattern makers, to optimise new collections by analysing current body-shape data.”
The Premaccess pluses: analysing the challenges, controlling costs and AWS expertise
“The strength of Premaccess lies in its expertise in software development, AWS managed services and migration. When we started looking at this migration project, its team first of all assessed what was at stake for us.
Beyond “Are we migrating to AWS?”, our thinking was rather about “Is it worth our doing it now, on AWS, and in this way?
Is it profitable for us to recruit resources to do this work now, or is it worth waiting a few weeks, until we have more resources and more budget?”
Even before this migration, Premaccess supported us on this “business” dimension so that we could optimise our finances.
Secondly, they advised us a great deal on the preparatory work for the migration and on setting up the action plan. Clearly, even though I am a developer, I had no experience at all of the AWS Cloud. Their contribution to the action plan was extremely valuable.
Finally, once the migration plan was approved, part of the move to AWS was carried out in-house with the support of the Premaccess team. They also took charge of the “Landing Zone and Security” part of our AWS space (creating users, managing permissions, preparing the network and the network layers, etc.). They deployed it through their SaaS solution BAM, which we now use every day for our temporary environments.
Starting from a well-defined template, this tool very quickly creates perfectly configured environments. Enough to save us a lot of time.
We are also always looking for efficiency. We seek to standardise our technologies across our various projects, to make our development cycles similar from one project to another. This is now made easier with BAM. This tool guarantees us process automation, and leaves no room for human error.
So we concentrate more on our development, on our core business. As a developer, thanks to this solution, I spend more time creating features and enriching our business side than setting up the technical infrastructure for our applications.”
Next challenge: offering Fitizzy in SaaS mode
“Our next challenge will now be to make Fitizzy completely SaaS. Any brand will then be able to configure our solution through our interface without even needing our teams to step in. The idea is now mature. The first building blocks are starting to arrive.
Clearly, this new project would have been very difficult to carry out on our old infrastructure. Thanks to this investment in the AWS Cloud, it is now within our reach, and it opens up new prospects.
In the development of Fitizzy, Premaccess is today more than a technical partner. Its team has such a knowledge of software development with AWS that it helps us improve our business and broaden our offering. I am thinking in particular of its advice on the managed services related to data management and on serverless. Enough to be one step ahead and reach new markets.”