This Chinese startup will help you try on clothes online by 3D-scanning your body, and it just got funded

I recently decided it was time to upgrade my wardrobe – I’m pushing 30 and my closet was filled with altogether too many graphic tees. I do most of my shopping online, so that’s where I went to buy some new clothes. But, like millions before me, I encountered a problem: it’s impossible to tell how well clothes are going to fit me online. As a result, I’ve already had to order and return quite a few things in search of the perfect pair of pants.

A Chinese startup called Liangtishiyi – roughly: measure your body and try on clothes – wants to change all that, and it might just have a chance. The startup just nabbed an angel investment from Zhe Shang Venture Capital to build out its system, which lets you try on clothes virtually by building a 3D model of your body.

What Liangtishiyi has on offer now is pretty rough. Users can download a Windows-only program that functions a lot like the character creation tools in many video games: you drag sliders around to make your avatar the size and shape of your body (pictured below). From there, you can check out some of the limited clothing items available. The service will show how the clothes would look on your body, and offers advanced options like transparent mode (so you can see where your body is under the clothing) and pressure mode (so you can see which parts of your body the clothing will be resting on). If you like how it looks, you can then click through to buy the item of clothing in question.

On its site, Liangtishiyi claims to be the “world’s first” software that allows consumers to try on clothes online using their own bodies. It certainly isn’t the first company to have that idea: American startup Fitle has been working on using 3D models for online clothes shopping since 2013, for example. But it may be the first to have a working prototype available to the public. Whether that’s really an advantage remains to be seen. Liangtishiyi’s technology is very cool, but the user experience currently feels a little dated – when was the last time you had to download a .exe file to make a web service work? Hopefully Zhe Shang VC’s angel investment will help the company put its technology into a slicker-looking package.

There are other roadblocks ahead for Liangtishiyi, though. The biggest: making partnerships. The company’s money will presumably come via partnerships with brands or online shops, who will pay Liangtishiyi to use its system and let customers try their clothes on virtually. But China’s online clothing shopping market is pretty fragmented. Many consumers buy clothes from a variety of the hundreds of thousands of small shops on Taobao, for example, and even B2C sites like Tmall and JD have lots of smaller shops Liangtishiyi might need to work with individually.

There’s no denying that Liangtishiyi is attempting to address a real problem with buying clothes online, though, and that’s likely a big part of what netted it this early round of investment. If the company can use that money to simplify and modernize its user experience a bit, it just might have a hit on its hands.