With many people buying clothes online versus in-store where they can try them on in the dressing room, finding the right fit can be a challenge. AIMIRR is taking on this challenge by bringing the dressing room to the customer with its real-time garment rendering technology that overlays images of clothing on a live video of the individual.
Founder and CEO Pritesh Kanani was exhibiting Seattle-based AIMIRR’s technology as part of the Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt and announced that the company closed on an exclusive partnership with Chicago custom clothing marketplace Balodana Inc. for its fitting room technology.
The company is also officially launching its first product and service in November after closing over 10 partnerships in Chicago and Seattle, including a collaboration with FashionBar at Chicago Fashion Week, taking place this week.
AIMIRR’s core virtual try-on technology shows the garment in 3D down to the size, shape and texture, including showing how the garment will fit as the individual moves.
“We are not just designing apparel filters, we are developing a graphical digital fitting room experience that remains true to a shopper’s body over any online shopping website,” Kanani told TechCrunch.
He got the idea for the company in 2020 while he was getting married. His grandmother wanted to pass down her wedding dress to his fiancee, but then the pandemic hit. With his grandmother in India and his fiancee in the United States, it was difficult to get the dress there and to know if it would fit.
Kanani recalls looking for options to help and decided instead to leverage his seven years in the computer vision and graphics industry building vision video creation tools to start AIMIRR. He honed the idea while part of the University of Chicago’s Polsky Accelerator program through which he got $120,000 to develop the technology.
The company has been operational for about four months now and has been offering a $49-per-month trial with a group of retailers to provide the technology on 10 of their garments.
The clothing brands host the technology on their websites and are able to gather data about the fit and popularity of the garments from the app. Currently, customers scan a QR code with their phone to activate the technology using their device’s camera. Kanani said the next iteration will involve an embedded link to create the experience on a laptop.
The company has largely been bootstrapped so far, but he has plans to attend two more accelerator programs and will raise a seed round in 2023.
“Our next steps will be increasing revenue and getting from the small business segment to our enterprise partnership,” Kanani said. “In the next six to nine months we will complete our shipping to production on the partnership that we have, and then finish off with the partnerships we are targeting. Beyond that, we will acquire funding to get into an enterprise beyond those 10 garments.”
Advances in fit technology could minimize those onerous online returns
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