Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Things They Should Invent: clothing characteristic search engine

Clothing geeks have a lot of nuanced opinions about which design features you should look for in clothing.  They'll mention things like woven vs. knit fabrics, bias cut, darts, and other fabric, pattern and construction features that I don't even understand.

The problem is it's difficult to look for clothing with these features. Even if you understand them, you can't reliably search an online clothing store for bias cut dresses, or efficiently look through a bricks-and-mortar store for bias cut apart from scrutinizing the fabric of every single garment.

Even those of us who aren't clothing geeks develop an idea over time about which design features work best on our bodies.  For example, I have learned from experience that I love modal sundresses. But typing modal into a website search bar is hit and miss (does zero results mean they have nothing in modal, or that you can't reliably search by fabric?  Or does it mean the modal sundress is labelled under the broader category of "rayon"?)  And to search for it in a real-life store, I'd have to read every single label.

Solution: a single, comprehensive search engine that does a fine, granular search of every single clothing store by clothing characteristic.

You can search for red and v-neck.  You can search for princess seams. You can search for Irish linen.  You can search by measurement, to screen out all the pants that you can't even pull up over your hips.  And it will give you the results for all the stores, or for all the stores with physical locations in your city, or all the online stores that ship to your city, or all the online stores that ship to your city with free returns.

Clothing stores' incentive to participate (and stores' and manufacturers' incentive to provide detailed information) is that this will tell potential customers that the store has the thing the customer is looking for. There are hundreds (thousands?) of clothing stores - dozens in my neighbourhood alone - and the very red v-neck or modal sundress I'm looking for could be right there in one of them, hanging in a place where passers-by can't see it.

Google Shopping could do it, I'm sure.  Currently it only seems to cover some stores, all of which appear to be major chains.  But if they could use their power and influence as the search engine of record to tell literally every store "Give us your clothing specs in granular detail, and the customers looking for what you're selling will find you".  (I'd also be thrilled to see someone non-Google do it, but Google more likely has the influence to get all the stores to participate.)

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