Shapermint's story

Shapermint, the world’s fastest-growing shapewear marketplace, is changing the conversation around women’s shapewear. Shapermint has created an online community of women who empower each other. The company’s commitment to body positivity and quality products has attracted more than 1.5 million first time shapewear users with a core message in mind - shapewear is not about hiding bodies but celebrating their unique shape.

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Shapermint's challenge

A fast growing marketplace, Shapermint is highly successful at acquiring new shoppers through social media and other digital campaigns. Through this successful customer acquisition, they have introduced their unique product assortment to millions of new shoppers every month. To maximize benefit from these campaigns, Shapermint also needed to minimize purchase friction in their marketing funnel.

Fit and sizing issues are an overwhelming friction point for users shopping online, reducing conversion and costing $25 billion in returns annually. [1][2][3] The fit issue is more acute in shapewear which is a sensitive category for women to shop. The Shapermint product team needed to find a non-invasive fit technology that neither asked users to select from graphic body shapes nor to submit their age, weight or other sensitive personal information.

In addition to the shapewear fit and size challenge, new customers were unlikely to be familiar with Shapermint’s products. The team knew that to maximize ROI on marketing campaigns, they needed to choose the fit solution that is the most effective at helping new customers with fit and sizing.

To meet the needs of their diverse customer base, Shapermint continued to rapidly expanded its product and brand assortment. These new items posed a challenge to returning Shapermint customers who were unfamiliar with size and fit characteristics of such products. The chosen fit solution needed to be frictionless and to quickly scale to new products and brands. Providing high confidence to returning shoppers would enable Shapermint to maximize the lifetime value of customers (LTV) and achieve a profitable re-marketing funnel.

Choosing the Right Solution: Fit Predictor by Secret Sauce Partners

Shapermint turned to Secret Sauce Partners in late 2019 to implement our innovative and customer-centric Fit Predictor technology. We recognize that most customers prefer not to provide sensitive personal data about their bodies. As part of our commitment to protecting user privacy and reducing the need to enter personal information, Fit Predictor uses an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based approach that leverages anonymous customer behavior data. Learning from hundreds of millions of shoppers world-wide, our machine learning approach intelligently models fit and sizing data on 100+ million SKUs. Fit Predictor, the first and only fit solution to reach Marketplace scale, supports over 60,000 brands, normalizes sizing data and augments existing marketplace catalogs with new size, fit, and style attributes.

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We Help Highly Valued, Returning Customers

Fit Predictor’s AI trains on customers’ past behavior, including purchases and returns, to provide a non-engagement based customer experience and hyper-personalized fit recommendations. The benefit of this approach is reduced friction, better conversion and lower returns.

Easy Onboarding - Solving the Cold Start Problem

For new shoppers, Fit Predictor solves the cold start problem by onboarding them with an easy-to-use 3 step fit calculator. Our algorithmic calculator optimizes conversion by engaging the customer at the right time in the purchase flow, yet avoids offensive questions about their weight, height and age that are required by historical fit solutions. While simple to use, our Fit Predictor Calculator’s backend is the result of hundreds of qualitative usability tests and randomized a/b tests. Derived from 2B+ transactions across the Secret Sauce network of marketplace and retail partners, our approach has been proven many times to yield the most effective conversion optimization of any fit tool to date.

Successful Outcomes: Increased User Confidence with Fit Predictor

Successful Outcomes

Independent qualitative research performed by Shapermint found that when Fit Predictor is added to the existing customer experience users are 3X more confident finding the right size and fit.

Reinforcing sizing information with [Fit Predictor] undoubtedly reinforces trust in the customer to continue their purchase with total security ...there are customers who do not know their sizes or perhaps do, but in other brands ... with this tool they can compare and be more confident in the size they are selecting.

Shapermint Growth Team
(in independent usability testing)

Successful Outcomes: Conversion Increase, Returns Reduction

After integrating Fit Predictor in Q1 2020, Shapermint witnessed the power of our hyper-personalized fit and size predictions measuring an 8% conversion increase and an over 5% reduction in returns.

Having established a strong position in the first quarter, Shapermint was well-prepared to face the market volatility resulting from the pandemic. Since then Shapermint has maintained a strong position - they continue to use the Fit Predictor service and see good outcomes as a result of the tool.

What most exceeded our expectations about Fit Predictor was the value the tool drives for our customers - even when customers do not engage with it! Their frictionless UX with targeted recommendations impacts 100% of our customers - the result was an impressive 8% Conversion increase and over 5% Returns reduction.

Lucas Vera, Co-Founder, Shapermint

Optimizing for Success

Fit Predictor’s built-in a/b and multivariate testing platform allows us to continuously optimize our internal algorithms and maximize long term value of customers across any product type or market segment. This continuous and automated optimization empowers Shapermint to offer the best fit and sizing advice to their customers today and provides the right platform to help tomorrow’s customers and an ever expanding product assortment.

Optimization diagram

Products used

Fit Predictor logo
Fit Predictor
Actionable Analytics logo
Actionable Analytics
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Fit Predictor finds a customer’s best fit in seconds by leveraging and augmenting retailers’ data. For new customers without a shopping history, the Fit Predictor service predicts the best fit based on the customer’s size in other brands as well as other shopping behavior. Fit Predictor is currently being used by over 100 million unique shoppers per month across global markets. Learn More

shapermint

Shapermint is a multi-brand, multi-item marketplace that provides a one-stop-shop for women looking to quickly and painlessly solve their shapewear needs. Shapermint’s mission is centered around body positivity and women empowerment. The Shapermint community is a group of strong, like-minded women. Where everyone knows shapewear isn't about hiding, but about feeling comfortable in your own skin, confident, and empowered.

  1. Clement, J. (Aug 20, 2019). "Fashion e-commerce in the United States - Statistics & Facts." Statista.com
  2. Clement, J. (Jul 15, 2020). "U.S. fashion and accessories e-retail revenue 2017-2024." Statista.com
  3. Amed, Imran, et. al. (Nov 19, 2019) "The State of Fashion 2020." p. 43. Business of Fashion. McKinsey & Company