Many of you may have received those annoying emails that are being sent through the site explaining that your bra has been taken out of calculations and please check a measurement.

The biggest part of these emails is regarding the cup width measurement, and this is happening because a mistake I made when I created the site. I deliberately did not specify whether or not you should include the wire channels on this measurement. My thinking was that some will measure with, some without and some in between, and the average at the end will contain the same error for all bras. Well, 16000 bras later, I was wrong.

We've decided now that the cup width measurement should not include the underwires, and we’re marking off all the bras that did consider it (most bras).

Cup width measured including underwires, 18.3cm

Cup width measured without underwires, 16cm

If we do this to one of your bras, you will get an email, while the bra is marked, the calculations will not include its measurements, so we would only consider those measurements without the wires.

If you re-measure your bra while it is marked, we will be notified and verify that the new measurement does not contain the underwire.

How do we know?

There are a number of places we can use to check if a cup width measurement is too big (includes the wires).

First we look at the rest of the bras in the same size, we assume that it should not be much bigger than the smallest one. we start by the assumption that it will be very hard to make a mistake and measure this smaller than it is, but it is easy to go bigger.

If there are no other bras in this size, then we check the sister size, then we check the next size up and make sure that the measurement provided is not bigger than the underwire for the next size up.

We also have bras with the same cut, and also can check that the increase between sizes is not too small or too big. Usually the cup width from consecutive sizes should not be much over 0.5cm.

Sometimes, we will find re-measurements that keep the original size with which the bra was marked, then we find ourselves in a problem. If after instructions the cup width is still too wide, what should we do?

There is the possibility that we were not clear explaining, or that this bra is indeed that wide. This can happen if the bra has been stretched, but we can know if it is within expected values based on surrounding bras.

On those cases what we proceed to do is to just disable this measurement for this particular bra, so all the other measurements are still considered, but not this one. Why? So when providing recommendations based on measurements we don’t recommend based on a very wide one case bra.

If we do find that all the bras in that size have consistent wide sizing, then we go ahead and enable all those.

What are the steps if your bra gets marked?

You will get an email, please reply if you need further help.

You will see your bra with an extra message indicating that it has been marked.

Then you are invited to re-measure your bra or just plain confirm the current measurements if you’re 200% sure that this is correct.

We will be notified of the actions and evaluate and proceed to unmark the bra. I’ve noticed some users sending pictures while measuring the bra, yes, they do help!

What are the next steps on ensuring correct measurements?

We will add some more checks on the site.

First, when measuring a bra we will do an automated check for an expected cup width and ask to confirm if it seems a bit odd.

Also, if you do have a marked bra which is listed, we will ask you to please double check the measurements before getting rid of it.

Where I messed up

When we started marking the bras, we did not verify if the bra was owned by the user anymore, which caused a lot of frustration having to have a bra marked off forever without being able to do anything about it.

We also sent emails for marked bras without checking how many bras a user had already marked, so for users that consistently measured including the wires it became a nightmare to receive 15 emails for the same subject, this caused anger, and anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. So no bra ever got measured and we just got ourselves an angry bird^W user The message indicating that the bra was marked, was too harsh and made it feel as if it was your fault that something was wrong, when it was actually my fault for not being clear from the beginning.

We addressed this, by an internal screen we use to make these marks which shows us when the bra was added, last measured, the date it was marked and also if it was marked as owned or not in the site. Then if the bra is not owned we just proceed to disable the bad measurement and not mark off the bra.

On this same screen we visualize which other bras a user has currently marked, so we can make a better decision on how to communicate with her and try to solve this.

The messages have also been changed, where we now ask for a verification for the measurement and not accuse you of doing it wrong.

When displaying a marked bra, we changed the tone from bloody red, to just a different font color so it is not too harsh on view.

Again, I am very sorry for making this initial bad decision, but we’re trying to fix this and we need your help to do so.

We have noticed a lot of bra fixes recently and numbers that are starting to make much more sense, for which I am very thankful!

Who is I and who is We? For the past few months Nesoa has been helping me day and night to keep up with cleaning the database, she helps deciding and marking the bras on and off so many of these decisions have been possible thanks to her help and thinking when I could not bra any further . If you receive emails from the site, they could be wither from me or her.