Frequently Asked Questions
What is the BESPEAK application?
BESPEAK® provides style guidance for business attire for men, including the best style of suit, dress shirt, tie, and pocket square to dress your personal best.
How does BESPEAK work?
The app recommends and coordinates the suit, dress shirt, tie, and a pocket square customized for each individual based on a personal profile.
BESPEAK® employs patent pending proprietary technology to create a personal profile based on hair color, skin tone, eye color, face shape, body shape and size. These algorithms were created based on intense analysis of classical style guides and designer preferences as seen in fashion advertising and runway shows.
How would I use the app?
- Create and store a personal profile for you (or others) based on hair color, skin tone, eye color, face shape, body shape and size.
- Then, you will receive a recommendation for coordinated outfits.
- To see additional recommendations of outfits, tap the “reload” button on the lower menu bar.
- You may input your own individual articles of clothing or prospective purchases and the app will make recommendations relative to your profile as well as evaluate and grade your choices.
Use it in the morning to decide which outfit to wear or how to improve an individual outfit or when shopping to help select profile perfect purchases.
Use it for selecting the most flattering clothes for a meeting, dating, or job interview; or for developing the dressing skill for how to look your most stylish every day…
Use it to dress your personal best!
What is a “Profile”?
BESPEAK® is the art of permanent fashionability based on your unique characteristics, or attributes, of color (skin tone, hair color, eye color) and body proportions (face shape, body size, body height, neck height) kept in a personal profile. Your stored profile drives the entire systematic evaluation that makes recommendations customized for you.
It’s so personal that men who are bald provide their eyebrow color when asked about hair color.
As a result of your completing the profile, you are shown only clothes and styles that make you look good – Your personal best! – as opposed to merely good-looking or fashionable clothes.
How many profiles may I create? How do I manage my profiles?
You may create as many profiles as you want. Tap the + sign to add a new profile. Click “edit” to delete unused profiles. Tap the blue arrow on the right to access and modify existing profile attributes.
I created a profile and I am on the main screen. Now what?
You are viewing the tailor’s table with fabric swatches representing the four components of a business formal outfit. This outfit has been perfectly coordinated with your profile.
You can now:
1. Tap the “Reload” button in the center of the lower menu (or shake the phone ?) to load other profile-perfect outfits by
2. Tap the “View” icon on the lower menu bar to view what the outfit looks like on your mannequin. (The mannequin himself is not clickable.)
3. Tap “Closet” in the lower left corner to “Save” an outfit to your closet.
4. Tap any garment swatch to lock, customize, exchange from closet, or shop for this garment.
What can I do with the fabric garment swatch?
Tap a fabric garment swatch to see the pop-up menu of swatch action buttons:
1. “Lock (garment)”: select lock garment to pin or keep this selection and reload (“Lock & Load”) other outfit recommendations while keeping this garment unchanged. You can lock up to three of the four items. The more garments you lock, the fewer the available recommendations; the fewer you lock, the greater the recommendations for other garments.
2. “Customize (garment)”: select the pull-down menus to modify each color (base color 1, base color 2, accent colors 1-3), pattern type and scale, and other attributes as desired.
3. “Pick from closet”: For each type of garment, you will find your personal assortment in the wardrobe. For example, you will find all of your ties in the tie rack or tie wardrobe. Select one tie from your list to view on tailor’s table or tap + to add a new tie. You can do the same for all other garment types.
How can I shop with BESPEAK®?
Shopping will be offered in the next application update.
How do I customize a garment?
Tap a swatch and select “Customize (garment)”: select the pull-down menus to modify each color (base color 1, base color 2, accent colors 1 -3), pattern type and scale, and other attributes as desired.
A yellow star indicates that this is a profile-perfect choice. If you select an option without a yellow star, a red warning badge will appear as a caution.
Your selections are immediately visible in the sample swatch.
Pattern selections require more than one color: at least two base colors for a pattern with equal weight for each color, such as one base (or dominant) color and, at least, one accent color. BeSpeak® renders all base colors and up to two accent colors, depending on the pattern style selected.
What if I don’t like a recommendation?
In that case, you may customize each and every garment by changing any or all of the attributes, such as colors, patterns, or pattern size. BESPEAK® will then evaluate your newly customized garment in relation to the rest of the outfit that you are designing to give you a profile-perfect recommendation or warning.
What does the design “quality score” mean, and why does it change when I customize a garment that I was recommended?
The proper look, or stylishness, is indicated by the “quality score”. The individual score on each swatch shows how well that particular garment matches you profile. This design “quality score” ranges from 1 to 10 where 10 is most favorable. Whenever attributes are changed, the scores are recalculated automatically.
The “quality score” is also applied to the whole outfit to determine how well all the garments coordinate with each other and with the selected profile. Individual rules displayed in the list you see by tapping the “Skill – Quality” button also apply the quality scoring from 1 to 10 where 10 is best.
What is a “Skill” score?
The “Skill” is the complexity to coordinate the garments of an outfit. It is a numerical score, which increases with the challenges posed by oufits featuring multiple patterns and variety of colors. The number combines the scores for individual rules applied and ranges at this stage from around 100 to 185: the higher the number, the greater the complexity of the oufit.
What is Lock & Load?
BESPEAK® Lock & Load allows you to take any single garment as the starting point for building your whole profile-perfect outfit. Let’s say you want to wear that “lucky” tie to an important sales meeting, then you:
1. Input the tie (tap the “tie” swatch, select “customize” and modify colors and pattern, etc.),
2. Save the tie by naming it (such as “Lucky”) and it will appear in the outfit,
3. Cycle through additional oufits that would match this tie by hitting the “reload” button at the center of lower menu bar,
4. Lock another item you like, etc. until you are entirely happy with the looks of a profile-perfect outfit!
The only condition is that your lucky tie must match your profile for this “Lock & Load” feature to work.
What is a red badge?
A red badge will show on every swatch and indicate the number of possible combinations that may be wrong in relation to the profile. To correct this and select a favorable yellow star option, tap the swatch and select “customize” to view the swatch details and the areas that would benefit from changing a color or other attribute.
The red badge will also show in “Skill – Quality” to pinpoint and educate you on a particular fashion rule that has failed with an outfit.
I have just a few suits and shirts in my closet. How can BESPEAK® help me?
The new BESPEAK® “Lock & Load” feature allows you to select manually and lock a garment that matches the garment in your closet. The app will recommend what to wear with the garment and each additional garment that you add from your existing closet.
For example, if you describe to BESPEAK® what kind of suit you have (by customizing the “suit” swatch), BESPEAK® will suggest what shirt, tie, and pocket square wear with it.
Where is my “closet”?
Tap a garment swatch, select “Pick from closet” and you will find all of your ties in the tie rack or tie wardrobe. Select one tie from your list to view on tailor’s table or tap + to add a new tie.
Right now there is no single integrated closet feature with all garment types. In the next version, there will be J.
I am in a store and I’ve found something (say, a tie) that I like. What do I do?
Tap the “tie” swatch and select the “customize” action in the pop-up menu. You can now rapidly customize the tie color(s), pattern type, and scale. Then tap “activate” on the top left of the screen to see your swatch instantly evaluated (score from 1 to 10, with 10 as the best) on its own or with the whole outfit score on the “Analysis” button.
If you tap this new tie swatch, you can also “lock” it (also see “Lock & Load”) and cycle through additional outfits that would work with this tie by hitting the “reload” button at the center of lower menu bar, lock another item you like, etc. until you are entirely happy with the look of a profile-perfect outfit!
Can I use the iPhone camera to input garments into BESPEAK®?
You can use the camera but the process is limited currently to one color per shot. We are working on expanding this.
We will offer an automated input process using Image Recognition technology. You will take a snapshot of any garment you like, receive an instant evaluation score, and match garments from the store you are in as well as from other stores. You also will be able to buy items right from your iPhone. Please check the next version for enhanced camera functionality for one shot camera input!
Can I use BESPEAK® on Android phones or on the Internet?
Sorry, not yet; coming soon to a screen near you!
Who is Gordon Gekko?
Gordon Gekko is the famously infamous (“Greed is good!”) and top-styled character created by Oliver Stone in his “Wall Street” movies and impersonated by Michael Douglas.
Why the name BeSpeak®?
bespeak tr. v.: to indicate; to request
Bespeak is the active tense of a commonly used term in the British clothing industry, “bespoke”, which means the buyer is in total control of the items made to a customer’s specifications. It’s far more than a made-to-measure suit or shirt; rather, it is the thoughtful, personalized decision on fabric, fit, style, and features customized to one individual. BESPEAK® makes this personalization accessible to every individual through technology: the BESPEAK® Personal Stylist application.
