Anyone who’s ever had to return ill-fitting clothes bought online knows how disappointing and annoying the whole process is. The two-year-old Swedish startup, Virtusize, solves that problem with a sizing application placed on product pages of online stores such as the British retailer ASOS.
Inspired by seeing how top sellers on eBay provided detailed specifications, the founders of Virtusize realized they could help shoppers buy clothes on the web with the right size and fit by comparing measurements to garments they already own. This simple yet handy service, currently used by customers in over 100 countries, is reducing fit-related returns by up to as much as fifty percent.
One Essential Daily Practice at Virtusize
We knew we had to find out more about Virtusize when Niklas de Besche (executive director at the software company Meltwater Group) let us know what his friend Anders Rindevall, Virtusize’s head of sales, had told him. One day over lunch, Niklas (also Anders’s former boss!) asked him, “What one thing do you never skip every day?”
Anders’s answer? He never misses reading his iDoneThis digest summarizing what the Virtusize team had done the day before.
“My colleagues and I travel a lot,” Anders notes, “and so it’s definitely the only thing I do every day, even when I’m in the office or when I’m traveling. It’s very useful.”
Virtusize started using iDoneThis after CFO Erik Ekstrand’s search for an easy personal tool to keep track of what he’d done everyday turned up our collective solution that simultaneously did this not only for him but his twelve-person team. Anders describes the appeal, “It’s impossible to remember what I did today when it’s next week. iDoneThis is perfect for following up on my own work while seeing what others are doing.”
Syncing in Time
One of the other greatest struggles as a startup, according to Anders, is that age-old battle against the ticking clock: “Time is very often a limitation. Right now we’re in the middle of a big change, and we’re moving fast. You think you have time to do stuff but you don’t.”
The employees at Virtusize keep moving fast by syncing with each other regularly in multiple ways. For example, the custom of the developers at Virtusize of holding a daily scrum every morning inspired the business team to hold their own meetings after their two-week springs. These “business demos”, as Anders describes, are “where we receive the benefits of iDoneThis, because we go back and track what we’ve done.”
Growth Involves Paying Attention to Others
At a busy company — whether everyone’s traipsing in and out of the office or dealing with multiple projects — simply following the courses of everyone’s work is a struggle.
That’s the challenge of growth, Anders explains. “Growing is always difficult because you need to not only focus on what you do yourself but what others are doing — and actually learn to focus on others even more and more going forward.”
Focusing on what others are doing can be somewhat delicate to navigate because you never want to feel as if someone’s breathing down your neck while you work. For Anders, implementing tools like iDoneThis actually helps his team do their work and collaborate in peace. He says, “I like that it’s not used in a way that we’re not monitoring each other at all. We use iDoneThis to get to an an understanding.”
We love that iDoneThis provides the perfect working fit for Virtusize!
