How Carly Bigi Is Using AI to Eliminate Fashion Waste Problems
By Amanda Breen
It’s mid-July, and the yacht on the Hudson is called Praying for Overtime — an apt name for the boat hosting the Laws of Motion event, where founder Carly Bigi and her crew’s passion for beautiful, perfect-fitting clothing bubbles up alongside the Aperol spritzes at the bar. Bigi herself wears a vibrant pink romper that manages to strike the balance between totally chic and still professional, a throughline for the collection, and the pieces on deck: a rack of white with subtle feathers ringing sleeves and hems.
Laws of Motion’s styles are modern takes on timeless silhouettes, but that’s where any resemblance to other brands begins and ends. That’s because Laws of Motion, which counts Rent the Runway co-founder Jenny Fleiss among its investors, relies on data to help customers find the ideal fit and reduce the impact of fast fashion (there’s an estimated 92 million tons of textile waste each year, globally).
“It helped me embrace the mindset that rules are suggestions.”
Putting tech at the company’s core was a natural progression for Bigi. Growing up in Houston, Texas, with deep roots in the NASA community, she learned to view “the present as a springboard for what could be possible in the future.” “[It] helped me embrace the mindset that rules are suggestions,” she tells Entrepreneur, “and that just because something was done a certain way before does not mean that’s how it needs to be done going forward.”
Bigi began her career in management consulting, where she learned how to build and run teams while identifying, defining and solving “some of the most complicated problems at some of the world’s most complicated businesses.” It’s a skill set she’s been able to put to good use at Laws of Motion — where precision and innovation are essential in addressing the fashion industry’s giant waste issue.
“Fundamentally revolutionizing the apparel industry means revolutionizing the role of precision data within the apparel industry,” Bigi explains. “And so Laws of Motion AI technology blends proprietary and complex computer visioning and learning tech with a very simple user interface to increase data precision and reduce friction in the buying experience.”
“Using just two pictures, no app required, it generates a 3D mesh of your body, and then will predict over a million data points.”
What does the tech look like in practice? It’s super simple — I tried it myself. I snapped two pictures of myself in dark, close-fitting clothing against a light background, and uploaded them to the site, where the tech anonymized the images and gave me my ideal microsize. The user-interface was seamless too: In a matter of seconds, I was back scrolling through the Laws of Motion collection, where any piece I added to my cart was available in that perfect microsize (there are 180 total). There’s also an option to complete a 60-second fit questionnaire for those who’d prefer that route, and the results are the same. Both technologies predict measurements with more than 99% accuracy, Bigi says, mapping the data to 1,260 precision sizes designed to be height and shape inclusive.
“Unlike other sizing technologies that anchor in gendered questions such as bra size, our body scanning technology is completely genderless,” Bigi continues. “So using just two pictures, no app required, it generates a 3D mesh of your body, and then will predict over a million data points that are then used to map your perfect fitting size while fueling ongoing sizing R&D as a whole.”
Because everything is made-to-order, Laws of Motion is a zero-waste, zero-inventory company, Bigi says, producing via its American-based supply chain. Additionally, the technology is “flipping the script” of core KPIs in the apparel industry: achieving a 1% return rate, increasing size inclusivity 20 times and generating a 70% higher profit margin compared to other direct-to-consumer brands. In the next five years, the brand will eliminate more than 4.425 million tons of CO2 emissions, Bigi says, nearly a third of what U.S. apparel brands are producing today.
“It’s not the typical approach, but nothing we do at Laws of Motion is.”
The brand’s on-demand production isn’t the only way it’s redefining fast fashion — it also takes a collaborative stance to make sure its offerings reflect customers’ real wants and needs. “Our customers play a huge role in our styles and colors, and I’m in constant awe of the relationship we’ve developed with them,” Bigi says. “It’s pretty incredible to see that evolve. Our most recent product, the Moxie romper, which I’m wearing today, was inspired by endless inbound from our community.”
“It’s not the typical approach,” Bigi admits, “but nothing we do at Laws of Motion is, and we’ll continue to launch new styles and collections monthly to really further validate our hypotheses of the multivariate relationship between women’s proportions and perfect-fitting apparel.”
And fast fashion isn’t the only problem Laws of Motion is committed to solving. Bigi is also determined to dismantle an industry that’s conditioned women to identify with a size. “It’s entirely baseless and is contributing to toxic societal norms that we are actively rewriting and rescripting,” Bigi explains. “At Laws of Motion, your size is your name, because it doesn’t matter what shape or size you are — what matters is that each product feels like it was made to fit you perfectly, because it was.”
“We envision a world where women of all shapes, heights and weights have equal access to perfect-fitting apparel.”
Bigi stresses that the apparel industry is “completely misaligned with consumer values.” Today’s conscientious consumers seek personalization, inclusivity and sustainability — all things that precision data makes possible. What’s more, other industries, including beauty and healthcare, have already evolved to fulfill those wants, Bigi points out, while the apparel industry lags decades behind. Laws of Motion is ready to be the solution.
“We envision a world where women of all shapes, heights and weights have equal access to perfect-fitting apparel that is specifically made for them using zero waste,” Bigi says. “And we won’t stop until that’s the norm across the entire industry.”
As the sun sets and excited attendees make their way below deck to try the tech out for themselves, it looks like the brand is well on its way to doing just that.
Photo Source: Courtesy of Laws of Motion
