Even though online shopping is maybe the greatest invention since sliced bread (and this is coming from someone who really, really likes bread), there are certain items of clothing that are very difficult to simply add to a virtual cart and continue on your merry way. Why? Fit. Among this group of difficult-to-buy-online things are bathing suits and also: Bras. It's simply impossible. Every single bra has a different fit, shape, and feel and you just can't know those details when you're looking at them on the Internet. Until now, that is. Bra retailer Brayola has created a more successful bra-shopping experience for women everywhere using crowdsourced data from REAL people who have purchased and tried on the bras they sell.
It's one thing to see how a bra looks on an average-sized model in the photos that websites use to display products — of course it's going to look perfect on her; that's kind of the point, right? And, as is the case with basically any photo associated with fashion these days, those images are almost always Photoshopped to further distort the reality of the fit and product, making online shopping (especially for bras) even more difficult.
Brayola understood this problem and quickly came up with a simple, but brilliant solution called #bModel: Real women who have purchased bras from the site submit anonymous photos of themselves wearing them (faces excluded for privacy) so that shoppers can judge for themselves based on the unedited pics of real women if that bra is for them or not. See? I told you it was brilliant.
There are a few retailers online that use a similar process with their products (Modcloth comes to mind). They let users upload photos along with their written reviews; nothing has ever been more helpful for me when shopping online. Sometimes it's a little disappointing, "Oh, it looks like that in real life?" and other times it's totally eye-opening in a positive way. But in any case, it makes things easier for me. And as someone who hates returning things (especially if it means a trip to the post office), this new feature from Brayola could save me a lot of time and money — and that's always, always a good thing in my book.
Even though the #bModel feature is new to Brayola, they have a ton of other ways to make bra shopping as easy as possible. This video gives you the run-down, in case you're curious (which you definitely should be).
