The New York Times

No Substitute for Getting Personal, if You Want the Perfect Fit

Bob Tedeschi

For all its innovations, the Internet has yet to crack what is, for many, one of life’s most vexing problems: how to find jeans that won’t make your backside look like a tractor-trailer.

A new online business, Zafu.com, believes that it has made progress on that front. Unlike, say, Amazon – which analyzes a visitor’s browsing and buying behavior and recommends merchandise bought by others with similar behavior – Zafu’s approach relies on users to do a little of the work.

On the site, which is basically a search engine for clothes, visitors click through a questionnaire of about a dozen items, after which Zafu determines the visitor’s body type and displays what it believes are the best-fitting jeans to suit that visitor (it offers only female styles for now). Each pair is modeled from several angles, along with a link to the product page of retailers selling the item.

The company, which introduced its Web site in August, can already point to a rapidly growing base of customers and merchant partners as evidence of popularity. The company’s early success underscores the industry’s slow but steady progress in personalization – finding ways to match customers with their stated or implied product preferences, and thereby satisfy what analysts say is a central consumer need.

“”Online shoppers are control freaks, and the tools they like the best give them the ability to customize something and do product comparisons,”" said Lauren Freedman, president of the E-Tailing Group, an Internet consulting firm. “”So I definitely see consumer appeal in what Zafu is doing.”"

Robert Holloway, Zafu’s chief executive, said the service had been about two years in the making. Starting early last year the company recruited women to come to its office in Emeryville, Calif., to test its recommendation system, and try on jeans.

“”At first, the accuracy was really low, about 50 percent,”" as at other apparel sites in general, Mr. Holloway said. About 20 percent to 50 percent of all jeans bought online, he added, are returned. “”Slowly but surely, we got it to the point where 94 percent of the women who went through our process said the jeans fit them great.”"

Since Zafu.com made its debut, Mr. Holloway said, the site’s traffic has grown rapidly, to more than 100,000 visitors this month, with virtually no marketing. The company makes money by earning a commission of 5 percent to 15 percent on every pair of jeans sold on the hundreds of retail sites with which it has agreements.

Ms. Freedman said one drawback of Zafu’s service was that it did not weigh heavily enough a user’s brand preference. “”I got a few hip choices, but it also returned me some brands I wouldn’t buy even if they fit me,”" she said. “”The label, for a lot of women, is as big a factor as the fit. But it’s still a really good service.”"