Post-Mortem for Bra Theory

http://bratheory.com/hiatus/

by hazelynut • 7 years ago

216 50 7 years ago

bratheory.com

dang• 7 years ago

Related from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18599728

floatingatoll5• 7 years ago

Back in 2009, HN also discussed "The Physics of Bras" (2005):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=925236

leoc• 7 years ago

While tailors have figured out a formula for men’s suits, bra tailoring is a younger technology with a smaller market and far fewer competitors. [...] But bras, coming after the Industrial Revolution, had no such history of custom tailoring.

Even companies trying to custom-make suits without multiple individual fittings are apparently still very much wandering in the wilderness, so it's not surprising (though of course disappointing) that an effort which started futher behind didn't succeed. Maybe this also relates to Boeing and SpaceX's parachute challenges https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21850831 : it seems fabric remains hard.

Robotbeat• 7 years ago

Fabric is a very hard problem because it has an extremely high number of degrees of freedom. Flexible materials are like this consistently. If you want automation, with few exceptions, you want stiffness.

Tesla has been unable to automate wire harness installation because it's super flexible with many effective degrees of freedom (they hope to solve that using a stiffer flex cable that consolidates the wiring). Even moving some fiberglass fluff with a robot was an unreliable bottleneck they eventually removed.

I even saw a project once that attempted to automate cloth handling by first stiffening the cloth with starch so it could be more predictably moved from place to place.

Cloth is fundamentally hard. It's not impossible to solve these problems, but it's not at all trivial.

remarkEon2• 7 years ago

Interesting observations. For some reason I’m reminded of this (admittedly pretty bizarre) concept car from about a decade ago by BMW.

https://youtu.be/0pwabDeqVi8

jiggawatts• 7 years ago

first stiffening the cloth with starch so it could be more predictably moved from place to place.

Hah! I thought I was the only one to have this notion...

I was thinking of impregnating cloth with a hard wax similar to candle wax and then melting it out after automated sewing.

Starch makes more sense from a cleanup perspective, but it may not have the required control over stiffness or other useful properties.

For example, wax would allow temporary joins using pressing and heating, which would then hold the material in place before the permanent sewing.

floatingatoll5• 7 years ago

Elsewhere on HN today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21876063

Uniqlo heads towards full warehouse automation with groundbreaking robot that can fold and box clothes

maire• 7 years ago

It is more than just the age of tailoring vs undergarment making that is the problem. If tailoring was the only issue, we would just tailor women's undergarments and declare success. The real issue is that women's bodies are far more variable than men's bodies. Most garment designing software gets around this by fitting exactly the hardest part of the body and then scaling everything else. Bras are one of the more difficult parts of the body to fit although the hip area (pants) are also difficult to fit for the female form.

Pants actually illustrates the problem in a way that everyone (men as well as women) would understand. You can't just take a few measurements and expect success. You have to know how the measurement is distributed. Is the added inches on the stomach? Is it on the hips? Is it on the posterior? I won't go into the many crotch measurements - but they are also important.

mynegation• 7 years ago

I buy my dress shirts at Indochino. They do multiple first measurements on you the first time, then they make a first iteration shirt. You come for a second fitting with that shirt when they look how it sits and re-adjust the measurements which are stored in your profile and all subsequent shirts are made to them. The result is pretty good. Never been to a custom tailor but I guess this is a good industrialized approximation of what they do. I am wondering if something like this could have worked.

ahaferburg• 7 years ago

Ever since I came across this video https://youtu.be/gy5g33S0Gzo?t=4 of a robot taking 1,5 hours to fold five towels, with mixed results, I think about how much of our brain might be devoted to handling fabric every time I have a towel in my hands. Probably the same with handling fluids, like predicting how milk is going to behave in an opaque carton.

cjbprime• 7 years ago

I remember reading and being impressed by some of the previous blog posts; commiserations, I'm sorry it didn't work out.

Archive link to the post, is down at the moment: http://web.archive.org/web/20191223180103/http://bratheory.c...

merlincorey• 7 years ago

I remember sharing it with my partner who is in a less common cohort and had done plenty of research prior to my sharing this with them... they were not at all impressed and felt like there was something lacking in their methodology and priors.

Specifically, my partner has found that the most consistent and predictable sizings are from the UK -- everything else is more all over the place and must be tested on a per brand and pattern basis.

The post by A Bra Theory states it can take as many as 9 attempts with their system to achieve a fit.

With US sizes and her proper measurements, it can take 3-4 attempts for my partner to find something that fits or determine that they do not carry anything that will. With UK sizes and her proper measurements, there is typically success within 1-2 iterations.

One can find more information about this on the subreddit wiki for A Bra that Fits: https://www.reddit.com/r/abrathatfits/wiki/beginners_guide

I find it strange that in the past nor in the present the Bra Theory hasn't seemed to lean on A Bra That Fits or the UK sizings and patterns.

afarrell• 7 years ago

My wife and I moved from the US to the UK a few years ago. My wife has also found that bra shopping is easier here.

sundarurfriend• 7 years ago

I genuinely thought "Bra theory" was some quantum physics theory with the bra operation somehow being central to it, and this was going to be about how that was disproved recently or something.

Thriptic2• 7 years ago

As a naive guy who is looking at this straight on with admittedly limited reflection, it makes sense that this would be a complicated space:

* You've got a data capture problem - how do women securely and privately obtain and transmit shape data in a way that is culturally acceptable?

* You've got a modeling problem - how do you determine how much structural support is required on a case by case basis?

* You've got a manufacturing tech problem - how do you create bespoke products cheaply?

* You've got a culture problem - how do you address the fact that a large portion of the population is by definition going to be smaller than average?

There are probably a series of other things I'm not thinking of but each of these are non-trivial.

floatingatoll5• 7 years ago

As a naive guy

I intend this reply to supplement your list of challenges, all of which are valid. I hope this helps convey an additional depth of complications in designing women's elastic support wear that may not be immediately apparent.

You've got a data capture problem

The missing piece here is the intersection of: clothing "fit" problem, where each person's body will interact with clothing at different points; the gravity "g-forces" problem, where the clothing is required to bear weight at every step without tearing apart; and the appearance "fashion" problem, where different shapes carry that weight at different points.

I'll take apart t-shirts first, and then switch back to bras.

Given several men of slightly different torso composition, a simple men's t-shirt can interact with their belly, lower waist (shirt length), ribcage, nipples (ask any runner), armpit, upper arms, neck. At each of those interaction points, the clothing must fit 'correctly' as perceived by the human being. Each human being has a preference for each of the listed areas, and will complain about poorly-fitting t-shirts if they do not fit 'correctly'.

I require loose armpit and long length shirts, among those seven options, and have more or less given up on ever finding a solution for my abnormally-shaped ribcage. So I typically end up in men's XL, because it provides enough 'airspace' to smooth out my torso and extends low enough to keep me from flashing people.

Someone else with the same torso length, torso diameter, and waist measurements might choose a Medium instead, because they have a decked-out bod and want to show off every curve. They'll need shirts made with more stretch than mine, or else they'll rip the armpits open waving hello to a friend. Shirts designed for a tight fit use a different 'cylinder' cut than shirts designed for a loose fit, so you can't just put them in my sized-down XL because I've been selecting for a different cut of shirt than is appropriate for their desires — and you can't just shrink all dimensions on an XL by 30% to get a M because human body parts don't shrink at the same percentage rate.

So, you can evaluate the 'fit' of t-shirts based on these criteria, none of which can readily be captured by 'shape data' alone:

* Does the shirt show off, or mute/hide, your physique to the degree you desire?

* Does the shirt rub uncomfortably, or rip/tear, when you move while wearing it?

* Does the shirt fabric irritate your skin, at your desired tightness?

You can custom-bespoke every shirt to a person's shape, but you'll still have to make fashion decisions ('drape', for example) that will include some and exclude others. If you end up deciding to print custom-fit "perfect mirror of your shape" fashion, that is fashion, too, and I would loathe it with all my heart because that is not what I want my clothing to express.

Moving on from the t-shirt analogy to bras, there are additional problems that bras have to solve for, that t-shirts do not:

* Bras are held with elastic against an extremely sensitive area of skin for hours at a time (sweat is a primary concern)

* Bras need to provide front and back appearances that matches the desires of the wearer (padded, unlined; demi, full coverage, balconette, push-up; longline, racerback, strapless)

* Bras need to provide support for 'weight' anchored to both sides of the chest (US average ~3lbs/side, K cup ~8lbs/side), that can cause pain every time you take a step, encounter small vertical G-forces (stairs, elevators, cars), or large all-directional G-forces (cars, subways, sports)

* Bra elastic loses stretch over time, due to wear and tear from the thousands of G-force events per day they intercept and reduce bodily impact of (adjustable straps, multiple rows of hooks, discard and replace occasionally)

So, not only do you need shape data, you also need "fashion" data, "fit" data, "fabric" data, and "gravity" data. You need data about composition — density for compressibility, shape for support and fashion, total weight for structural integrity — that you can't measure at home easily if even at all. You need material that can stand up to being punched from within a million times that also feels comfortable when held skin-tight all day. You need to make it fashionable, while keeping it fashionable across multiple size vectors (band size can vary from 24" to 48" or more, cup size can vary from 1/AA to 8/H or more). You need to transfer G-forces from the wearer's chest to the elastic while not digging into their skin more than they can bear (bralettes, underwires). You need to plan for elastic weakening over time (adjustable straps, multiple sets of back hooks).

Many men only see that level of tailoring in bespoke suits/tuxedos, and wear them once a year or less, and suffer no consequences the rest of the year. Many women have to wear one every single day, or else they suffer chest pain (F=m*a with only skin and ligaments to bear it) and/or societal outrage. It's a really intense market to try and serve.

I hope this helps.

PappaPatat• 7 years ago

As a married since 30 years and father of 3 girls in their 20's, I thought I knew a thing or two about bras. I now know I knew nothing.

Thank you very much for this detailed write up.

Thriptic2• 7 years ago

Incredible explanation. This is an order of magnitude more complicated than I originally assumed. Thanks for taking the time to educate!

prox• 7 years ago

There is also the 2D to 3D problem, if you’ve ever tried modeling clothing on a mannequin to make patterns, you’ll notice how much skill it takes on a doll with perfect measurements. I think the problem here is there is way to much variance in shapes to come to a custom 1:1 for everyone. People are asymmetrical, and proportions vary wildly. I mean you could cut corners, but you probably end up generalize to the extend that it isn’t really custom fitting anymore if you want to scale this up.

empath75• 7 years ago

I think maybe the problem is that they swung for the fences out of the gate — a general solution to automatically creating custom fitted traditionally made bras for any body type.

They could have maybe had more success by being less ambitious:

Focus on one body type that has a relatively easy solution to make the ‘perfect bra’

Make custom bras that are close and require a single trip to a tailor for small adjustments — or one that enables the customer to make markings somehow and send it back to the company to adjust.

A “smart bra” for fitting that has sensors that send measurements about stress and weight distribution.

Try and figure out new materials and construction methods that cover up for inadequacies in the fitting algorithm. Make something that looks unusual but works — like crocs shoes. Some people will hate it but others will swear by it.

joostdecock• 7 years ago

I hope the effort to distill bra-fitting into an algorithm won't be thrown out. Perhaps they could be donated to FreeSewing.org ?

Full disclosure: I am the FreeSewing maintainer

thringaversa• 7 years ago

Yes, that would be really cool. I found some bras that fit me well for a time, but seem to wear out. By day, I'm a composites engineer, so I would love to use some really good patterns and see if I can make one with Kevlar or something that will wear out more slowly.

goodguy1234• 7 years ago

Can anyone explain to me like I am 10?

There is an algorithm for man suit?

meheleventyone2• 7 years ago

Clothing tends to be cut from patterns of 2D shapes that are then sewn together. In theory if you measure certain key parameters of the customer you can adjust a standard pattern to fit them without further refinement. Imagine if you took a thin man, fat man and normal man then measured them all, and designed a pattern based on the normal man. Then found weighting’s to scale the pattern to the thin man and fat man. You could then (in a naive fashion) interpolate between these weighting’s to create patterns for every man inbetween. That would be your algorithm.

yjftsjthsd-h• 7 years ago

But does that actually work for men's suits?

IshKebab• 7 years ago

They were trying to design custom-fit bras automatically, based on 10 measurements of the body. But 10 measurements are too few to capture the wide variety of boobs that exist, and it was too expensive to gather ground truth examples (because you have to pay for expensive custom fit bras for a load of women) so they failed.

dgellow• 7 years ago

The article ends with a link to https://www.reddit.com/r/ABraThatFits/, a subreddit for people looking for well-fitting bras. Just a cool little thing to know about if that's your (or your partner) situation.

bhouston• 7 years ago

I think you needed more time and a more sophisticated approach. One could have used a 3D scanner and acquired the body shape and then one could parameterize it and then figure out the deformation you want to achieve from the bra -- even preview it for the customer, where do they want things to end up, and how much stress that will put on their body -- and then one could figure out the patterns to make again from the contact areas you wanted.

Basically it is a 3D problem and I think you didn't take a sophisticated approach because you are likely not knowledgable in that area.

You tried to apply tailoring to it, but tailoring is not body fitting nor shape changing as a bra is, nor is tailoring about stresses and weight distribution (which is comfort.)

It is a solvable problem, but your approach was not the correct one, it was simplistic.

It is an incredibly interesting problem though.

ISOcGAxAgO• 7 years ago

I agree with your take on this. Facebook has done considerable work with their Detectron / Dense Pose projects which can UV unwrap human bodies using AI. (https://github.com/facebookresearch/DensePose) Another is the smpl / smplify-x project (https://github.com/vchoutas/smplify-x)

Further, by utilizing generated (synthetic) data with 3d scanned human models, or generating your own with something like makehuman or daz3D, you should be able to find a way to UV unwrap a distorted sphere. I've had a lot of success with generating synthetic data like this with Blender 3D and training various neural networks (Mask RCNN / Deeplab for example) with various combinations of this synthetic and real datasets.

erichocean• 7 years ago

Yup, they have the wrong tech approach. Good they stopped wasting money though…

layoutIfNeeded• 7 years ago

Reminds me of: https://xkcd.com/1831/

soulofmischief• 7 years ago

Sorry to hear that... I had high hopes for Bra Theory.

Our biggest challenge was not the technology, but the underlying methodology.

We could not automate that which we did not know how to do by hand.

I like applying the inverse of this. If I don't know how to do something, I try to automate/simulate it, and this creates for me an organic path to the knowledge I seek by creating problems which can be solved. Perhaps your algorithm simply needs further refinement.

I was brash, and thought that with the right team, we could accelerate centuries of learning into six months and a trade secret

Ah. You didn't give yourself enough time. A research project like this is 2 years minimum, 10 years on the long side. But it has to be done if we are ever going to push the envelope.

Perhaps scaling down the company to just research and consulting for the time being would provide a way to continue in your spare time.

nestorD• 7 years ago

Reading the description, I though that there is enough interesting, high-level, material for a few phD thesis (algorithm, material science, industrialisation of a process, etc).

I would love it if the author found a way to keep the research effort going in an academic setting.

tranchms• 7 years ago

“We could not automate that which we did not know how to do by hand.”

rossdavidh• 7 years ago

There is a saying: "if you don't know how to do it, you don't know how to do it with a computer".

_-o-_• 7 years ago

I wonder if it's possible to scale measuring by replacing measuring process by making a 3d scan (several versions - regular, with arms raised, etc.).

Then this data could be mapped to a simplified model which, in turn, could be used to figure out measurements of the bra.

namibj• 7 years ago

Actually, having multiple views/angles and just capturing how the skin moves in 3d-space when forces are induced (through e.g. arm raising, jumping, or various other methods) should allow for inferring some elastic properties. This could allow detailed fitting with parametric stiffness/support trade offs.

jeffrallen• 7 years ago

I hope progress continues in this space for my wife and my daughter. But I'm also aware that my wife is a satisfied-enough bra user today, and I suspect many other women are too. So maybe this is a problem worth solving, but not as urgently as others... suppose I need to ask them to know for sure.

gbronner• 7 years ago

There's a tension between solving the problem perfectly and burning your first customers to gather data, fund development, and iterate.

The best product startups have a both curious perfectionist scientist and a commercial sales person working together.

avgeek23• 7 years ago

I am surprised how there isn't a fixed Industry standard for bra sizing. Maybe bra sizing can learn something from Pcie,usb,sata standards.

Someone i was with for a long time used to always complain how all manufacturers are different and that even using stuff like a bra that fits(reddit thing) did not work in Asia as manufacturers here have different sizing. She still hasn't found her perfect fit size.

martyvis• 7 years ago

There definitely are standard sizes, but there is enough variation between manufacturers and between wearers that comfort can't be achieved at the level all can agree on. My wife has difficulty in finding the right bra and I have difficulty in getting the right shoe ( which you also would expect to be standardised)

entwife• 7 years ago

A good source of data to build an algorithm for bra fitting, is women tailors in India. Specifically, I would ask and observe how they fit women for cholis (sari blouses). The fit of a choli is similar to a bra, although the silk or cotton choli fabric is usually less elastic.

This November I got my first cholis; it took two fittings for an expert tailor to make them fit correctly to my form factor.

aasasd• 7 years ago

I guess I'm somewhat confused about the path of this company. From the post, it sounds like they didn't have any process for bra manufacturing at all, even manual one, and barely found anything like that in the end. So then, from the start the company was looking into automatic custom production of something about which they didn't have any knowledge? And the whole thing was essentially a wild shot at research for such production, from next to zero?

I mean, it wasn't my money to spend, but I'm curious as to if it's ‘normal’ now to form a startup while having only a goal and no expertise. That's a dream of every ‘idea man’ out there, including me.

mncharity• 7 years ago

Regards input, getting from a user to their happy regions of a high-dimensional specification space, I wonder if improving tech might permit a richer dialog, an more interactive and iterative process?

AR is improving 3D measurement, material modeling and property inference, and VR motion and force sensing. So we might imagine a much richer input stream becoming available.

Welcome to App. A video mirror. Let's go through your bras. We'll scan the fit of each. What do you dis/like about it? Point out where. Let's apply force measurement device X over here, yes, that's it, ok, got it. Move like so. Apply manipulation like so. Adjust X. Let's do a motion scan when you do X. Does X feel like X?

Virtual access to an expert fitter via "video phone", without direct touch and manipulation, isn't ideal, but with enough tooling, might be sufficient. And has advantages, like "watch bra fit during an entire workout". Or "today was an unusual day - here's what chafed, and the current exact adjustments". Or "here's real-time and prompted reporting over a month".

I wonder if there might also be a role for inexpensive prototypes or test objects. I'm reminded of an optical trial lens set, with its very clunky eyeglass frame, into which one inserts a variety of interchangeable lenses. One might imagine buying properties of "highly adjustable" and "transparently instrumented", with "clunky" and "doesn't last".

Basically, use tech to permit an expert fitter to succeed remotely, augmenting and perhaps eventually automating them. In a setting of long-term collaboration with the user. And perhaps input-side development might be decoupled from manufactured output, by doing product recommendations?

leeny• 7 years ago

This story is heartbreaking to read as a founder, but boy oh boy are there parallels between making bras and recruiting marketplaces. I"m the founder of interviewing.io, and we think about stuff like this a lot.

1. To scale, you must first become recruiters. And then, unless you're careful, you are become Shiva, a recruiting agency. And then you can't scale because you hired a bunch of in-house recruiters (maybe you're clever and call them "talent advocates") and are forever constrained in the best case to linear growth, growing as a function of how many recruiters you hire.

2. AI-based recruiting solutions that claim to match candidates to companies don't work for the same reason you can't use ML to engineer bras. The data isn't there. Scraping LinkedIn and GitHub doesn't do it, and then you have to bespoke "measure" a bunch of candidates. The hard part of that venture, in this market, isn't doing the ML. It's getting candidates (who have more leverage than you and don't need you) to give you interesting data about themselves.

3. "I thought that the likeliest outcome of launching is to end up like Peach/Zyrra, in which they launched their patented custom-made bra service, pivoted to a traditional lingerie product, and now sell women’s apparel loungewear. While the concept sounded promising, they were in the end unable to turn the concept commercial with the capital they received"... How many recruiting marketplaces have pivoted to do SaaS hiring assessment tools? I can think of at least 3.

Automating stuff by hand is hard. It's even harder when you don't have data and when it was never done well by hand in the first place.

Post-Mortem for Bra Theory

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