Phoebe Gormley, founder of Savile Row’s first tailoring house, launches Fit Collective – an AI-powered platform with the aim of reducing billions in clothing returns.
The entrepreneur behind Gormley & Gamble, the first women’s tailoring store on London’s Savile Row, has raised £3 million for her new venture Fit Collective, a technology start-up that uses artificial intelligence to solve one of fashion’s most expensive challenges – inconsistent sizing.
Phoebe Gormley, 31, said inaccurate sizing costs the global fashion industry an estimated $230 billion a year in returns, with the return rate for premium women’s clothing reaching 50 percent in the UK alone. “Consumers are frustrated and retailers are losing a hell of a lot of money,” she said.
Fit Collective’s platform analyzes how garments fit different body types, drawing on sales, returns and fabric behavior data to give design and production teams “clear, actionable insights” to improve fit and reduce waste.
The Holborn-based company employs ten people and plans to double its workforce within a year, with a focus on recruiting engineers. Fit Collective was founded in June 2023 and already manages more than £1 billion in retail sales. His customers include Rixo and Boden.
The £3m seed funding round, which values the company at £11m, was backed by Albion Capital, SuperSeed and True Capital, as well as angel investors from Net-a-Porter and Farfetch.
Gormley’s experience as a seamstress gave her both the expertise and data to tackle the fashion industry’s size crisis. After dropping out of college in 2015 and using her tuition fees to start Gormley & Gamble, she built a business that dressed “princesses, CEOs, schoolgirls and everyone in between.” She noticed one common complaint among all customers: poor sizing.
Her experience led to what she calls “the world’s only data set of body measurements and clothing items” – a foundation that informs Fit Collective’s technology.
Gormley said most existing online sizing tools are flawed because they rely on incomplete user data and ignore how each brand defines sizing. “You don’t know if a garment is designed to be three sizes too big or two sizes too small,” she said. “Only about 3 percent of buyers actually use them.”
To illustrate the problem, she bought 20 pairs of women’s jeans, all labeled size 28. “The largest had a 74cm waist and the smallest had a 66cm waist – that’s a 12cm difference, or about three and a half size differences,” she said.
By helping brands standardize sizes and reduce returns, Fit Collective hopes to make fashion not only more profitable, but also more sustainable – reducing the carbon footprint and financial cost of ill-fitting clothing returned each year.
