The PS Collective

40% of women in America are BIPOC. 68% are a size 14+, customers return 40% of clothes due to sizing (~$95B), yet universal sizing hasn’t been updated since 1940. Lack of reflection/representation within the sizing system reverberates throughout the supply chain: 

• Responsible for 20B garments ending up in landfills annually 
• Creating greenhouse gas emissions of 1.2B tons/yr
• The largest global polluter after oil

We focus on on-demand creation, sustainability, and body scans to address markets overlooked in fashion.     

Clothes manufacturing is based on homogenous body standards from the '40s. By applying mass standards to unique individuals, it results in unused clothing and returns. 

Fast-fashion companies exploit Black and Latino communities by creating clothes more reflective of their body types. They do more harm than good by supporting factories not paying fair wages, advocating for mass consumption, and targeting lower-income minorities only perpetuating socio-economic norms.

At The PS Collective, we're solving the problem of lack of inclusivity in fashion, by leveraging technology to capture the diversity of body shapes. Lack of inclusivity in fashion has several consequences, including further marginalization of minority communities, production of unwanted clothes resulting in waste, and decline in women’s emotional health. 

Diversity and inclusion are words often used by brands and companies to align themselves with the cause however, this seems to be done without much clarity on what those terms entail in practice. This is not only a social problem, it translates into a business and environmental one too. One major consequence on these fronts is that customers who do find themselves represented by the industry are returning or throwing away millions of tonnes of clothes every year that do not reflect their real size. 

Despite knowing this, companies still do not cater to unique body cohorts (ie.:plus-size, tall, petite, and beyond). We want to put the choice back in the hands of the consumers and be a source of empowerment for women starting with the clothing they choose to wear on their bodies. 

Most of our competitors use size guidance tools or plugins on top of inaccurate data that does not cater to unique body cohorts (such as plus-sized women). We use AI to enhance the fit of clothing for women with a size agnostic, personalized approach. Two pictures of the user and a self-assessment allow us to identify key body measurements and curate shopping pages on an individual basis. We work with sustainable designers who use deadstock materials, natural dyes, local talent etc. to create on-demand, eliminating waste/inventory. By leveraging technology, we guarantee fit of style, value, and shape. 

We are able to uplift local artisans and communities, eliminate carbon emissions, decrease returns, and promote conscious shopping which creates a more favorable vertically integrated system and longer-lasting clothing life cycle.

We are serving both independent designers and Women in our community. Smaller and mid-sized designers have had a difficult time competing with larger mass retailers, especially during the COVID pandemic. Returns significantly hurt their business, where returns and waste are inherently built into the mass retail structure. After surveying and speaking to independent designers around the US, we realized The PS Collective could help them to find their niche customer base, more accurately serve them, drive loyalty, and develop learning for future collections. 

On the consumer’s side, shopping is a guessing game. Sizes do not always correlate to fit, quality is synonymous with price, and lack of inclusivity creates rifts in the shopping experience. We conducted a survey of women between the ages of 18 and 49: 70% of them confirmed their frustration in finding proper fitting apparel. Industry reports support our claims. Mintel says the #1 problem in the Women’s Apparel industry is sizing and Deloitte says fully customizable apparel could claim ~30% market share by 2030. But more importantly than the numbers is the way it makes Women feel. To consistently run into issues with clothing and fit, to constantly feel that you’ve been labeled and put into a box, to only see skinnier, white women in luxury clothing after a while leaves an imprint in your brain saying “you are not good enough.” We want to help these women feel confident enough to love the skin they’re in.

A company centered around clothing may seem trivial, but clothing speaks to the wearer’s identity and can influence first impressions. There are stories behind the clothing too: abuse and unfair wages are a reality, not only abroad. Our solution combats the perpetual marginalization of individuals who have been told they don’t matter. Our technology is not retrofitted on broken inventory systems, we are not assuming size based on homogenous data, and we are not replacing the creativity and talent of humans. The PS Collective is creating a more representative and sustainable World, putting the individual back into the equation.

We have created our MVP and integrated it into Shopify, our preferred platform. We have tested it out on 20+ women, have a waitlist of 45 Women for our beta service, and have 32 designers signed up and waiting to use our service. We will be launching in beta within the US in August.

The PS Collective is reinventing the apparel supply chain - from the inception of a piece to delivering the garment to the consumer’s hands, we are using a combination of technology and local talent to create in a more efficient, inclusive, and sustainable way. This begins with women but is only step one of a longer vision. 

We are the first company to use our specific AI and ML algorithms applied to this purpose. By connecting niche brands to the consumers who need them the most, we are able to create a more equitable environment for all, where a Woman with Dwarfism and a Woman who had a mastectomy are able to find clothing in the same place. 

Our overall vision is to create a truly vertically integrated model. We are working with the University College London and other partners to digitize the pattern-making process, which will cut down on waste. We will then be able to feed the customer’s measurements in and dynamically manipulate the pattern to the appropriate proportions, saving the designer about 2 hours per person. With local fashion distribution centers and digital patterns, a designer can create an item closer to the user, cutting down on shipping carbon emissions, lead time, and returns, while prioritizing quality, local workers (being paid fair wages), and personalization.

We currently have 40 customers registered on our website, and 1180 social media followers between Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Clubhouse. We anticipate having 100 beta testers in August for our launch. After launch, we plan to go through one more product iteration where we’ll improve our offering based on feedback from the beta customers and will finally open up to everyone. Our initial target market size is 3M US women, 25-34 years old who are multicultural, care about what and where they spend their money, are conscious of the social and environmental impact of their choices, and consider themselves to be tech-savvy. At full-scale our market opens up to all women 18-44 who care about what and where they spend their money, are conscious of the social and environmental impact of their choices, and consider themselves to be tech-savvy, equating to 17.7M. 

As we aim at becoming the most inclusive marketplace available, we need to set up a series of goals to reflect this. As an inclusive company in the tech space, it is not sufficient for us to adopt a user-centered approach, we also want to ensure that no user is marginalized and that the product is centered around all types of users and not just those who are within easy reach. We actively seek diverse groups and regularly measure our inclusivity through this framework:

• Representativeness: 

  • How diverse is the team that’s developing the product?

  • Is the product discriminating against any category?

  • How do different categories of users rate the usability of the product?

• Equity of impact:

  • Are users from different categories getting the same outcome from the product?

  • Do KPIs (MAUs, churn rate, conversion rate) differ in different categories of users?

• Equity of experience:

  • Are ratings of the product different among different segments?

  • Are different segments equally likely to recommend the product?

Finally, we also have sustainability goals to ensure that our impact on the environment is kept at a minimum:

• To decrease returns for any given brand by 25% within the first year;

• To recycle >90% of unused textiles;

• To sell 100% sustainable clothing on the marketplace

2 full-time; 2 interns; 1 contractor

Our advantage is not working in the industry we are trying to change. We look at it as consumers failing to be represented by the industries we're in, marketing and tech, but more broadly by the fashion industry. That is how we are able to garner our loyalists both on the designer side and on the waitlist/social media (consumer side). Francesca and I met in 2018 on a cofounder matching site and we have been working on this since 2019. Francesca is the CTO and building the technology. I have experience working with Fortune 500 companies and seeing how Multicultural marketing affects business outcomes, Francesca has years of experience in medical tech and a Ph.D. in Computational Modeling, as well as having recently been recognized by RE.WORK as one of the 30 women advancing AI in the World. We have two power-house interns in the product and UX/UI areas, who value inclusivity and sustainability and are able to translate our values into their designs.

Our team, inclusive of advisors, is 100% female and 63% Multicultural. Of our designer network, 97% are Women and 50% are Multicultural. It is my mission to do the work to find and build a team of diverse individuals - in thought, background, and skill. Coming from a more traditional/corporate background, I’ve seen the mistakes companies make. When diversity, equity, and inclusion are not in the mix from the outset, it’s difficult to fix. The environment becomes unwelcoming, the work is uninspired, and it’s difficult to keep good talent around. The PS Collective is committed to keeping the team above 50% Female and Multicultural.

We're applying to Solve because of its people-centric ethos, the strong network of technology experts, the opportunity to work with challenge partners, and the potential to secure funding to ramp up our business. 

Francesca and I are both employed full-time as we work to launch The PS Collective. It’s a dream that I took a leap of faith on and we hope that MIT Solve will take a leap of faith in us. To be accepted to this program would be a catalyst in the future of the PS Collective. It would allow Francesca and I to quit our jobs and put 100% of our focus on building, executing, and scaling. Having a significant amount of student loans and a lack of family/friends investment options, being accepted to Solve would allow me to shift my focus to my business rather than making a paycheck. 

There are a lot of accelerators and incubators that are driven by sales potential rather than output and I love that MIT Solve is different in that regard. Francesca and I see the slippery slope when technology is driven by efficiencies and the bottom-line rather than the end consumer. In our case, the end consumer is not just the shopper, but the Earth, and the convergence of fashion and technology is only expediting the poor practices that already existed in the fashion industry. MIT Solve can help us to educate and provide better solutions to those who weren’t aware that there are better alternatives out there.

Public Relations: I have a background in marketing and strategy but from a traditional and digital standpoint. Our product is heavily based on having a strong social presence/community and I could use the extra guidance on how to reach niche audiences both organically and using paid media. 

Technology: Francesca is a talented ML engineer and has been recognized as such (Named one of the 30 women advancing AI in 2020). However, as we scale, it would be beneficial for her to be able to bounce ideas off of a mentor or potential partner and receive assistance from a back-end and front-end perspective.

Monitoring & Evaluation: Our KPIs are not just based on sales, we want to deliver the most helpful data to our designers to make more educated decisions, we want to measure the impact we are making from a sustainability perspective, and we want to build a robust data set of diverse Women reflective of the US population. In order to accomplish all of these goals, we would want to connect with an expert to help us map out a path.

We are currently partnered with the University College London to conduct research and develop the digital pattern-making piece of the supply chain. Once we have launched and can show traction, we would also like to partner with CLO3D (a 3D fashion design software program creating virtual, true-to-life garment visualization) to further automate the process for the designer and be able to cater to different body types/measurements more easily. We can then also use those digital renderings to create a truly personalized experience with the customer seeing an avatar of themselves in all items on the page. The last partnership we would be interested in is one with Joy Buolamwini and the MIT Media Lab. Her work in algorithmic bias challenges tech industries to take care in the applications they are putting out into the World and she challenges the government to educate themselves and regulate corporations releasing dangerous, racist applications to the public. Given a lot of her work is on facial recognition of Females and minorities, we would love to work with her to build out a more representative data set for Women’s bodies that would have more use cases than just fashion (ie. healthcare, security, etc.).

Qualification: The PS Collective is using the latest AI and computer vision technology to more accurately identify measurements of women’s bodies. There are significant algorithmic biases present in applications that identify the human body. This goes beyond fashion, as we hope to create the World’s first truly representative 3D body scanning data set, which has applications in healthcare and security as well. Our solution will also empower small businesses and local talent (ie. seamstresses, tailors, sewers, etc.) by using data and technology to reduce returns, find the right customers, and cut out big companies not paying fair wages. 

Application: Winning the $100K prize would be a catalyst for our business’ growth - Francesca and I would be able to quit our jobs to focus full-time on this venture. We would be able to keep on our interns and pay them for their work, hire front-end and back-end contractor support, and market and educate women who fall into our target market.

Qualification: The PS Collective is using the latest AI and computer vision technology to more accurately identify measurements of women’s bodies. Our goal is to help women feel seen, heard, and supported through the platform of fashion in hopes they can love the skin they’re in.

Application: Winning the $75K prize would be a catalyst for our business' growth - Francesca and I would be able to quit our jobs to focus full-time on this venture. We would be able to keep on our interns and pay them for their work, and the rest would go towards marketing and education for women who fall into our target market.

Qualification: The PS Collective is using the latest AI and computer vision technology to more accurately identify measurements of women’s bodies. This goes beyond fashion, as we hope to create the World’s first truly representative 3D body scanning data set, which has applications in healthcare and security as well. 

Application: Winning the $200K prize would be a catalyst for our business’ growth - Francesca and I would be able to quit our jobs to focus full-time on this venture. We would be able to keep on our interns and pay them for their work, hire front-end and back-end contractor support, and market and educate women who fall into our target market.