Hi All, my first (hopefully) contribution here:
Problem: Pet owners and manufacturers struggle to get sizing right when purchasing and selling dog clothing and accessories - time loss and frustration for customers, extremely costly for both consumer and manufacturer/distributor/retailer
Solution: Develop a method/app to solve the problem - note that the size charts provided by manufacturers and directions on how to measure for their items still result in high rate of size exchanges.
Method 1) Crowdsourcing
Customers who have already purchased items enter in the product ID (UPC/ASIN, etc) result of how it fit their dog, the sizes of their dog, and the owner's satisfaction level (fit ranking on scale of 1 to 10) as well as photo.
(what is incentive to enter the data, mutually beneficial data? sharing their photo? discount coupon?)
App takes this data to make recommendations - manufacturers and retailers use this app to help customers make better decisions.
ex. your dog has back length of 16" and chest largest circumference of 25" and you would like a waterproof jacket for your dog = we recommend these three items with rankings for your dog size of 8/10, 6/10, 5\10, respectively.
350 of 400 people purchased item for their dogs and said it fit 'great' or higher - their dog had the same measurements as your dog. Here are 10 pictures with comments of dogs wearing this garment.
Method 2) would be a scanner app for the iphone or so which manufacturers can then take to match up to customers via making recommendations or actually producing - in this implies the direction of manufacturing towards more automation which appears to be the case
Revenue Model: a few possibilities (sell to manufacturers, SaaS, free to consumers or retailers in exchange for ads or % of rev or sales. T.B.D.
There is a lot going on in this area with regards to human apparel including several well VC funded cos. The problem is big as well with pets (jackets, dog boots, etc)
I would be interested in being involved in a profitable way to solve the problem - I have experience with pet apparel and contacts within the industry.
thoughts?
thanks,
Did this go anywhere?
You need to spend some time fleshing out your Solution section a bit more. Currently it reads a bit like that how to draw an owl picture.
It sounds like you aren't a developer yourself so having that really locked down will be a lot of your value in the early stages along with the industry contacts.