What's In The Box
The brand new podcast from BOXTEC. Join us as we invite guests from retail and hospitality to discuss the issues of the day, with one unique twist: uncut, unedited and each episode just fifteen minutes long - because we're busy and we know you are too.
What's In The Box
From Florence and Fred to Tru-Size: Julia Reynolds' Journey to Solve Fashion's Fit Problem
Finding clothes that actually fit is a universal struggle, but it's not your body that's the problem—it's the entire fashion industry. Julia Reynolds, the retail veteran who helped bring Florence and Fred to life at Tesco, has spent her career watching consumers struggle with ill-fitting clothes while retailers battle astronomical return rates and mounting sustainability challenges.
After experiencing this frustration firsthand, Reynolds founded Rey House and its tech arm Tru-Size, harnessing the power of generative AI to revolutionize how clothes are designed and sized. The current fashion model expects consumers to fit into standardized clothing, but Reynolds flips this approach entirely: "We are trying to create clothes to fit people, not trying to find people to fit the clothes."
The numbers are staggering—UK returns alone cost retailers £7 billion annually, with 93% due to improper sizing or fit. Through sophisticated body scanning technology capturing 20,000 measurement points, Reynolds' team discovered something remarkable: human bodies naturally cluster into seven distinct shape categories, and the mythical "hourglass figure" celebrated since the 1950s doesn't actually exist in their data. Even more fascinating is how modern habits like smartphone use have created "tech neck," physically altering how clothes need to fit our shoulders.
Tru-Size's software integrates with existing design systems, allowing manufacturers to create garments specifically for real body shapes—not idealized forms. With three body shapes representing 64% of the population, retailers can dramatically reduce returns while consumers finally find clothes that fit their actual bodies. The implications for sustainability are equally profound, potentially eliminating thousands of tons of textile waste annually.
Ready to experience clothes designed for your actual body? Follow Julia Reynolds' journey as she transforms fashion one accurately sized garment at a time.
Welcome to what's in the Box, the brand new podcast brought to you by Box Technologies. Powering retail with purpose. Boxtech delivers innovative and market-leading customer engagement solutions that turn business ideas into a performing reality, from design and integration to ongoing support and maintenance. We're with you every step of the way. Now, this podcast is a little different to what you might be used to. It's audio only, totally unscripted, and just 15 minutes each episode. Because we're busy, our guests certainly are, and we're sure you are too, so let's get right into it.
Speaker 1:My guest today is something of a retail veteran, and I'm sure she'll tell me off for that in just a moment. Having previously been CEO at Antler, black's Leisure and Fig Leaves, and also before that as category director at Tesco, she was instrumental in bringing the Florence and Fred brand to life. It's fair to say that she is passionate about clothing fit, especially for women of a certain generation, and we're going to get into that during the podcast. This led her to founding Ray House, a brand based around designing and making clothes to fit the target market of Gen X women. This in turn led to creating TruSize, which is the software arm of Ray House and uses generative AI to create accurate, body-shaped mannequins reflecting the real demographic. Julia Reynolds, welcome to what's in the Box.
Speaker 2:Thanks, andrew. Thanks for the introduction. You said to me I need to talk about myself for a bit, but you've actually summed it up quite nicely. Well, yeah.
Speaker 1:I did a quick summary there, but yeah, I thought I mean we obviously were going to get into what you're doing now and I know, as I said there, that you're very passionate about it and you and I have talked a lot about this, haven't we? But just before we get into ray house and and clothing, fit and so forth, just tell us a bit, because you've been with a, a number of brands, and I mentioned that at the end. Perhaps, maybe, let's, let's start with your time at tesco and bringing the, the f and f brand to uh, to the high street, as it were I was very fortunate that I was one of the founders of the Florence and Fred band back in 2000.
Speaker 2:We launched it in 2001. And it was what the aim was to replicate or do a version of what George Asda had done, under a slightly different structure, because we were actually part. We weren't he was a separate company, we were actually part of it. We could see the opportunity for buying clothes in the supermarket that had never really been done properly. Quality wasn't great, fit, styling, everything, bringing fashion to the supermarkets and you've got a captive audience in a supermarket. They're walking around anyway, so their customers are already there. You've just got to convert them. So it was a huge success right from day one. And so I was there for eight, nine years.
Speaker 2:And then I decided to go off and go to the dark side and start working with private equity, and that's when I became chief exec of figleavescom, which was a pure play business at the time. Well, it still doesn't exist anymore, but it was one of the first pure plays in the market and I'd recognized my time at Tesco that if I didn't move with the times, that I was going to get left behind and I needed to get understanding of digital. It was really key for my career to survive and I'm glad I did, really, because Tesco never really got there and I can tell you all the reasons why it didn't work and why Primark haven't done it. It's all about the margin, it's all about returns and the cost-to-serve model, but one of the things I really learned well, lots of things I learned in fig leaves, but one of them was the cost to serve model, the whole value chain, which has then influenced me with what I'm doing now.
Speaker 2:So I went on and I found myself doing turnarounds, which is a really tough place to be, and I sort of exhausted myself from it and decided that that wasn't what I wanted to do anymore. So I've got into this, which is basically looking at the problem of sizing Sizing in the UK, but what's turned out to be it's a global problem. Uk, but what's turned out to be, it's a global problem. So I started Ray House out of a frustration for myself not being able to find good quality clothes to fit at a, at a good price, a value for money price not cheap, but value for money which then got me talking to a whole host of women between the ages of 40 and 80 actually. And then what's transpired from that?
Speaker 1:I've gone on and realized that it's just, it's not just women of a certain age that affected, it's actually younger women, it's men, it's children, it affects everything and it affects everybody around the world so so are we saying that you know for our uh, for our listeners, with, um, as I said in the intro earlier in the intro, you and I have talked about this quite a, quite a, quite a lot, but we're saying that wherever you go, whether it's a primark or a river island or an m&s or online or whatever sizing, sizing differs across, you know whichever retail, retail business or brand that it is. And, of course, I guess what you're saying is that we don't come in standard sizes no, no, there's, and there's a couple of issues here.
Speaker 2:The big key issues are that sizing is not standardized, so you could be a size 12 in one retailer and a size 10 in another, a size 16 in another. So sizes are not standardized. And the second major problem is that nobody has really measured human anatomy, they say, since the 1950s. There was an attempt to do it in 2005 which failed miserably, but nobody has actually taken the bull by the horns and said right, let's measure the population. Now I understand there is a survey going on which is government backed, which is just I think it's starting in september this to try and gauge the real, actual sizes of everybody in the or not everybody but the Joe public in the UK.
Speaker 1:Do you think is that driven because you know, we know, we heard a lot. The government wants to reduce obesity and so forth because of the cost for the NHS, wants to reduce obesity and so forth because of the cost for the NHS.
Speaker 2:I do, and what's funny is that the research that we've done. There are intrinsic links between health and body mapping, body sizing I think there's that, and also there is the big elephant in the room of sustainability. So the UK returns process costs businesses about seven billion pounds a year. In the uk 93 of returns are due to incorrect sizing or fit and on average that 50 of consumer spend on clothes online is being refunded by retailers. The other sort of big number is a million tonnes of UK of textiles in the UK are discarded and over 300,000 tonnes of UK textiles are sent to landfill or incinerated every year. Now that data is out there on the. You know it's out there in the in the domain.
Speaker 1:So or I'm sure quite a few have seen images of the atacama desert in chile. Yeah, a lot of it ends up, ends up there.
Speaker 2:So when I set off on this mission I started with my journey was I'm really hacked off as a consumer and I've been a retailer all my life that I can't find clothes to fit. All my friends, family, peers have told me and I've collected the data that this is the same problem. This leads to low self-esteem and people not wanting to spend their money, despite the fact that the demographic I was targeting originally are the fastest growing in the UK and have the largest spend. Then that led to me looking at sustainability and, oh my God, you know the problems to the planet, which then encompasses everything you know, everybody and everything in clothing. So I started to look. I'm blessed with a few engineers in my business, in my family, and I started talking to them and for a long time I felt that the retail businesses don't embrace other industries, other technologies, as much as they should do. You know there's lots of fabulous stuff going on in the car industry and it just doesn't seem to cross-fertilize into the fashion industry. So I started looking at this and whilst I got my tape measure out and my spreadsheet and I started to measure, people was to look at why things weren't fitting the way that retailers were. I then realized that I needed to use technology to do this. So our little business, true Size, was developed and we bought a scanning machine from Taiwan which takes 20,000 measurement points and we started to scan bodies female bodies between a certain age and that's actually quite difficult to do to get people to come in and strip off their underwear and be scanned. But what became very, very clear very, very quickly was we could see the different body shapes. I could see that when I had my tape measure out and I was asking friends, colleagues, neighbours, friends of friends, acquaintances, people from the yoga club, people from the tennis club, asking them to strip off and me measuring them, I could see that there were various body shapes. So we trademarked those body shapes. So, instead of being pear-shaped, apple-shaped, et cetera, we realized that there were actually seven body shapes. We think they are. We've refined that to seven body shapes and we've given them names. We've called them diamonds.
Speaker 2:But the point is is that we then started to gather data and we try through the scanning machine and we put it into a big algorithm. We worked with two really really advanced data scientists and both with PhDs from Oxford and Cambridge, really really clever people, and we tried. We said do these body shapes actually fit into one of these seven categories or are we just talking nonsense? And the reality of it was there were very, very clear clusters we could see and as a point they actually asked me to and the two data scientists actually asked me to then physically, two data scientists actually asked me to then physically go through and look at the because these were 3d avatars that we took of human, human forms to, to put them into the category, to sensor check it, to see what I thought, which category they sat in, and I got about 80 right, so that the artificial intelligence and the algorithm was more accurate than I was. Interestingly enough, we had one category, which is a traditional hourglass shape, which we didn't find. Anybody that we scanned fell into that. We didn't find one.
Speaker 2:And I followed up with a couple of other organizations that have been looking at younger women's physiques because I thought, well, maybe if we get to south america we'll see. You know, we'll see more sort of greta garbo, marilyn monroe shapes or whoever those 1950s celebrities were. And she said, no, she can't find any. She one of the women we spoke to she said she can't find any either. There isn't anybody that is typically that shape.
Speaker 2:So we then, from that data, we could then see how many people that we had scanned and it wasn't thousands of people how many people we had scanned that sat into each category and then we could see how big or small they were.
Speaker 2:So we started to develop sizing as well. Now we're not very far down the line with that, because we need to scan more bodies and we need more data, but we we're working on that at the moment. So, in a nutshell, I can tell a retailer, from the data that I've gathered by postcode the first three digits of the postcode, because it's whole GDPR compliance along with this, which we've adhered to the first three digits of the postcode, the age at which the person was when they were scanned. So it's not date of birth, it's just the age, the category that we believe they sit in, using our algorithm, the body measure, the average body measurements of that person, and so that's the size. So we could tell retailers that they could target. Your customer looks like this in general and they are this size and they are living in this area and they are this age?
Speaker 1:The significance of that? Presumably so. You gave us earlier the figures on returns and the reason and we know that there is a huge cost for retailers for returns, and certainly garments that then they don't end up back on the shelf, as it were, on the rail, they end up in landfill, or what have you? So is it the retailers, who are really your target audience, to give, for you to be able to give them the insights that they need so that they can be manufacturing, through their supply chain, clothes that actually fit people, which then massively, presumably, will reduce returns, apart from all the other benefits that go with that?
Speaker 2:That is exactly it. We are targeting the retailers, the thing that I've looked at here and when people ask me what is the business about, I describe it to them as we are trying to create clothes to fit people, not try and find people to fit the clothes. That sums it up pretty well. At the moment, the process of designing and making clothing is based around somebody's idea of what someone looks like, and what we're saying is, through generative AI and using this data in the right way and an algorithm and collecting the right data, you can understand who your customer is, what they really really really are like, what size they are. Now there's going to be outliers and we've got outliers in our model and that will go on as we gather more data. Yeah, but we can see there are definitive patterns and you can then design product. You plug our software into your design software and we've proved it. We've done it with the London College of Fashion. We've got all the data on that, we've got the examples, we've got samples, we've got everything. So you can design. Plug it into your design software. So you can design, plug it into your design software. The designer will design around that cluster and it could be.
Speaker 2:We've got seven. One we haven't managed to find any data on, so we've got six. We know that three of those body shapes equate to about 64% of the population. So take the three major ones. You create clothes to fit those avatars generic avatars and then you, through the merchandise planning, the buying, etc. You target those customers in the area that that you know that they live and what size they are and what shape they are, with the view that you should be able to reduce your returns dramatically. Now we've modeled this, but it is all. It is a model. We haven't. We've got evidence on our own website of what it's done to returns and we've eliminated products and put other products on, but we don't we haven't evidenced that through a major retailer yet, which is our target for the next 12 months to start working with a major retailer so this is, I mean, yeah, you mentioned ar, generative ar a number of times, and so this is not something that presumably could have been achieved 10 years ago, maybe even five years ago.
Speaker 1:So this is a capability that you've developed using, let's call it, modern technology, and you would think that retailers and the brands would be absolutely banging on the door to understand more about this.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and I will give you an example. I wrote a little blog on it the other day. Actually, tech Neck One of the things that we found when I was trying products on people and working out why things weren't fitting. A really simple thing move the shoulder seams forward on a garment for anybody over a certain age. But also because everybody's now suffering with tech neck and one of the worst things in fit is when something doesn't fit on the shoulders. It's falling back or it's hanging off your shoulders or etc. And I see it all the time I get. I get all these sort of um instagram posts of some young girls I'm not being disrespectful here, but people who don't really know the industry that well, who've, who've designed a women's wear range and you know they've got the ultimate this and the ultimate that. And you just just see from the models and they put them on gorgeous women, et cetera, and those gorgeous women don't have tech neck exactly compared to the rest of us.
Speaker 1:Tech neck just.
Speaker 2:Tech neck is where you're used to sitting on a computer or looking at your phone, and it's forced your shoulders forward and your head to drop. It's a well-known phenomenon now it's called technic, and as you get older, gravity sets in and your spine tends to curve anyway. So from the data that we've collected, we know that the shoulder seams should be a minimum of two centimeters further forward than if you were looking, you know, taking a pole down, you know down somebody who is dead straight. It's at least two centimeters and that's just a basic. That's just one of the basic things. If nobody took any notice of our technology and just looked at that, they would get a better fitting garment. You then get into armhole shaping where the bust sits, where the waist sits, and the industry has always looked at things. We'll take our specification and then we'll design something and then we'll develop it and we'll make it.
Speaker 2:I'm saying no, no, no. Turn that all upside down. Turn that completely upside down. Start with your customer what shape are they? Start with that, then then gather the data, cluster it and then design for it and then then you sent, then you get it manufactured and then you send it to them. Then you get it manufactured and then you send it to them and the grading is all wrong as well. And what's interesting is, I've sort of had a number of sort of disagreements and altercations with people who are saying to me no, it doesn't work like that, it doesn't work like that. I'm saying no, no, no, I've got the data here. Have a look. Here's the actual data.
Speaker 2:These, this is physically what people look like yeah and there is that old chestnut oh, we've always done it like this. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You know, I know you've always done it like that, but and that's, I think, where the problem lies is trying to tell retailers they've been doing it wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, julia, it's absolutely fascinating. We could probably go on talking for a lot, lot longer, but we'll need to leave it there. But where can people find out more about a warehouse and TrueSize?
Speaker 2:They can come onto our website. They can come onto our website. They can come onto linkedin. We don't post much on social media outside of that because it's a b2b. Yeah, they can contact me directly, julia, at ray hyphen housecom. All my details are on linkedin. Both businesses have business accounts on there, so it's all on there okay, lovely.
Speaker 1:Well, that's all from what's in the box for now. New episodes will be dropping every two weeks, so please stay tuned, and if you want to find out more about box deck, please follow the link in the description, and all it remains for me is to thank my guest, jul Julia Reynolds. Thank you so much, julia. That was absolutely fascinating. Thanks for listening, thank you.