Phoebe Gormley, founder of Savile Row’s first women’s tailoring house, launches Fit Collective — an AI-powered platform aiming to cut billions in clothing returns.
The entrepreneur behind Gormley & Gamble, the first women’s tailoring business on London’s Savile Row, has raised £3 million for her new venture Fit Collective, a technology start-up using artificial intelligence to fix one of fashion’s most expensive challenges — inconsistent sizing.
Phoebe Gormley, 31, said inaccurate sizing was costing the global fashion industry an estimated $230 billion a year in returns, with premium womenswear return rates reaching 50 per cent in the UK alone. “Consumers are frustrated and retailers are losing a hell of a lot of money,” she said.
Fit Collective’s platform analyses how garments fit across different body types, drawing on sales, returns and fabric behaviour data to give design and production teams “clear, actionable insight” on improving fit and reducing waste.
The company, based in Holborn, employs ten people and plans to double its workforce within a year, focusing on hiring engineers. Founded in June 2023, Fit Collective already manages more than £1 billion in retailer revenue and counts Rixo and Boden among its clients.
The £3 million seed funding round, which values the company at £11 million, was backed by Albion Capital, SuperSeed, and True Capital, alongside angel investors from Net-a-Porter and Farfetch.
Gormley’s tailoring background gave her both the expertise and data to tackle fashion’s sizing crisis. After dropping out of university in 2015 and using her tuition fees to start Gormley & Gamble, she built a business dressing “princesses, CEOs, schoolgirls and everyone in between.” Across clients, she noticed one universal complaint: poor sizing.
Her experience produced what she calls “the only data set in the world that has body measurements and garments” — a foundation that informs Fit Collective’s technology.
Gormley said most existing online “find my size” tools are flawed because they rely on incomplete user data and ignore how each brand defines sizing. “They don’t know if a garment is designed to run three sizes too big or two sizes too small,” she said. “Only around 3 per cent of shoppers even use them.”
To demonstrate the problem, she bought 20 pairs of women’s jeans, all labelled size 28. “The biggest one was a 74cm waist and the smallest one was a 66cm waist — that’s a 12cm gap, or about three and a half sizes difference,” she said.
By helping brands standardise sizing and reduce returns, Fit Collective hopes to make fashion not only more profitable but more sustainable — cutting down on the carbon and financial cost of ill-fitting clothes sent back each year.
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Savile Row entrepreneur Phoebe Gormley raises £3m for AI fashion sizing start-up Fit Collective