Friday, November 30, 2007

Fuck you, Land's End

I was at Land's End's web site today, messing around looking at some coats they have. There's a button for "try it on" somewhere, and it took me to a site that appears to be run by "My Virtual Model" where you can set up a whole model of yourself to try clothes on with.

When I put in my actual height and weight, I got this message

We're sorry.

You cannot create a model with the height and weight combination you have entered. You may be able to create a model close to your size by adjusting one or both of these measurements.

Or, click "Cancel" to use our generic model.


I am fat, but not some freakishly sized person that it would be difficult to build a model for. So fuck you, Land's End, and My Virtual Model too if they are a different entity, for wasting my time so you could essentially insult me at the end of it.

I think it's really stupid to release this product with these limitations.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tam, it makes no sense to have a virtual model that has such limitations. I would think it would be fairly easy to program the software to accept more variety in body sizes. Anyway, is Lands End trying to tell you they don't sell clothing in your size? Not a good market ploy to piss off your customers this way. Especially, since Sally told me that the US now has 1/3 of the population in the obese category. Does Lands End not want to market to these people?

Sally said...

That is unbelievably stupid.

I could not find a live link to My Virtual Model on Lands End, but I was able to google the site:

www.mvm.com

And on that site, I could enter any weight between 50-350 with any height. So what the fuck was up with Lands End?

Tam said...

Wow, now that is really weird, Sally.

Hi, Sally's mom! I'm glad you see around.

The funny thing is, I was in the plus size area of the Land's End website, looking at the plus sizes of a coat, when I clicked the "try it on" link that then gave me that error message.

Sally said...

I wonder if Lands End realized/hand it pointed out to them by an irate customer that something was screwed up with their Virtual Model thing so they took it down to fix it. I hope so!

For the record, the Virtual Model didn't do a lot for me, because the figure looked skinnier than I actually am (esp in the hips/thights), but I "tried on" a Lands End tunic and discovered that even my too-thin model looked bad in it, so I guess it can help you weed out the especially unflattering things.