Presize’s body-scanning software for smartphones measures body dimensions and, using smart algorithms, comes closest to the correct clothing size – or to a completely individualized pattern design. textile network met with Presize co-founder and CEO Leon Szeli in Munich, Germany, – to talk about technology, trends and TikTok.

textile network: Leon, what do you consider as the most important trends influencing the near and longer-term future of fashion – in design, manufacturing and elsewhere – and what do you work on recently that you think is emblematic of where the industry as a whole is heading?

Leon Szeli: Based on our experience of working with more than150 brands and conducting dozens of consumer interviews every month is that a) 50% of fashion revenue will be generated online in a few years and b) consumers will expect the key points of an offline buying experience also in e-commerce. Most fashion e-commerce still have a lot of homework to do in this regard. A good shopping assistant is consulting you on the right fit and size, what looks good on you and recommends other products that fit your style, body and the products you already have in your shopping basket. Also, you of course have the option to try clothing on and check how it looks.

With 50% return rates in our German home market and 30% in other EU countries size and fit being the #1 return reason with fashion eCommerce, this topic had been our focus Presize from the beginning. Virtual try-ons and personalized style consultation represent another promising segment (smiles).

textile network: As per your personal opinion: Where can the journey for apparel companies, for their customers, go in the long term? Do you expect completely new players to increasingly enter the global fashion business? From your insight are the classic apparel companies up to all this?

Leon Szeli: We are seeing a completely new segment emerging. I call them the “performance-driven Shopify D2C brands”. They are very data-driven, conduct many AB tests, understand performance marketing very well, outsource many parts of their supply chain and leverage Instagram and TikTok for their marketing. Many of them scaled from zero to 10m € fashion ecommerce revenue within two years with a team of less than 10 people. This will be massive competition for more traditional fashion players who didn’t scale their e-commerce business despite having a lot more time, manpower and resources.

textile network: You yourself would not have an apparel nor a fashion background: As an alumni, respectively graduate of Stanford University, University of Cambridge as well Technical University Munich your domain is in Human-Computer-Interaction. Similar for your two founder partners at Presize. What in your eyes is lagging when it comes to the education and training of apparel experts. What is you recommendation to adjust curricula and content also at the required pace?

Leon Szeli: The biggest shortcoming I frequently encounter is many fashion experts not being truly consumer- and data-driven. Even with the best design, sourcing or marketing skills in the world you can never outperform someone who truly knows what their end customer wants and who they are. There are still too many brands out there which just set this north star of marketing to a certain persona, e.g. “40 year old men who enjoy sports” and then never make the real-world check. Are these people really your customers? What is their age, weight, height, body shape? Which products in which sizes do they keep vs. return and why? Have you run quantitative AB tests on your website to see if your assumptions about your users are actually true?

Everyone says they are customer- and data-driven, but how many experiments did you actually run in the last quarter? Often decisions are driven by gut feeling which leads to losing customers. There is a market segment out there which would like to buy your products but they don’t because a) they don’t fit in your products or b) your marketing activities are not tailored towards them. Oftentimes it turns out the people who actually want to buy are neither 40 years old nor enjoying sports. Even though they have been marketing to that target group for decades.

textile network: Your mutual business idea and its implementation with a view to the underlying data-based algorithms had attracted considerable investment right from the beginning. But what was the actual acceptance of the users in the market place in recent times?

Leon Szeli: From where we stood between 8% and 30% of the users on a website used our solution to receive a size recommendation from Presize. A traditional size chart lately was typically used by around 1%. In 2022 so far we were expanding our product offering to provide size advice to users who don’t use Presize by leveraging our existing data on if a product runs bigger or smaller than expected.

textile network: And what have you been working on lately?

Leon Szeli: Next quite obvious problem to get solved: “does that piece look good on me” once we solved the “will it fit” problem.

textile network: Leon, thank you very much for the interesting insight!

Comet-like career

28-year-old Leon Szeli and his two co-founders, former fellow students at the Technical University of Munich, Presize CPO Awais Shafique and CTO Tomislav Tomov, leveraged artificial intelligence (A.I.) methods from day 1 back in 2019 for their start-up initiative.

In the fall of 2020, German multi-investor Carsten Maschmeyer invested € 650,000 in the startup in exchange for a 15 percent stake. A welcome local marketing side effect: the pitch for the deal was made publicly on the TV show “Höhle der Löwen” (the german equivalent to the US format “Dragon’s Den”).

With its proprietary technology and business model, Presize had already convinced US accelerator and investor Plug and Play in 2019. The former promoter of Google or Dropbox also participated with a six-digit amount. With a total of € 3 million in capital raised from investors.

And now that: Mid of April 2022 Facebook Corporation Meta Platform Inc. announced the takeover of Presize. (Read the news here.) The customer list of fashion companies that use Presize.ai for e-commerce already showed itself stately and with continuous growth before the takeover.