“Aam” means ordinary in Hindi, which is my native tongue. We’re trying to do something that we feel should be ordinary: designing clothes for women according to their bodies and body type.
Editor’s Note
In this ongoing series from Stanford Business magazine we use an annotated photo to tell the story of a manufacturing business overseen by a Stanford GSB alum.
Neha Samdaria, MBA ’18, is the founder and CEO of Aam The Label.
Right now, the vast majority of brands sold in the U.S. are not designing well-tailored clothes for a woman who has a curvier shape with fuller hips and thighs. That’s about one in four American women. I have this body type, and I’ve struggled to find clothes that fit. For most of my life, I just assumed that the problem was my body.
In my first year at the GSB, I traveled to Rwanda on a global study trip. We had an afternoon free in Kigali, and I decided to head into town and do some shopping. To my surprise, all the clothes fit me perfectly right off the rack. I asked the storekeeper what was going on, and he told me that they’d thrown out American sizes years ago because they didn’t work for Rwandan women. That was the light bulb moment.
I came back and dove into this. I discovered that in 1939, the U.S. Department of Agriculture measured about 15,000 women to develop standard sizing. The study was quite extensive, but it made a series of deeply flawed assumptions. For one, it only included white women in the final results, and we know that body shapes tend to vary by ethnicity. It also concluded that weight and height were going to be the primary indicators of size, which doesn’t account for the distribution of weight in the body.
The study wasn’t representative of all women then, and it certainly isn’t representative of all women now. Yet almost a century later, we’re still using this as the basis for sizing. When I learned that, I got really excited because it meant that this was a data issue — my background is in data and analytics. If we could have better data, then we could potentially solve this problem.
Most brands start with a creative vision at the top and it trickles down. The way we design at Aam is a bit backward compared to the rest of the fashion industry because we start with the customer and design around her needs. — Told to Dave Gilson
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