The First Ever National Childrenswear Survey in 3D

Between 2008 and 2010, Select Research Ltd set up and managed the first-ever children’s survey using 3D technology.

This project was complex and involved measuring babies from a month old to toddlers aged 3 manually, and also 4 to 17-year-old children using Select's 3D technology. Parental consent was required for the children to be measured, but over 2,500 children were successfully processed, creating what is still believed to be the largest data collection of child data in the world.

The ShapeGB project produced over 500,000 measurements of children and led to new sizing specifications for retail based on the body shapes, including the manufacture of new trade mannequins for clothes production. The outputs also created a change in sizing designations and focused more on the height of children. The data clearly showed that height, rather than age, was a better differentiator of clothes size for children.

Separately, the data was used by Select Research to create new algorithms for the Body Volume Index (BVI) for children, as the Body Mass Index (BMI) had little value in measuring and tracking child body shape. With children, both height and weight, the components of BMI are variables, and it is not possible to track a measure with two variables