I was told a fashion designer couldn't solve a technology problem. I built Idntfy anyway.
Why Idntfy Exists
For most of her career, Nina Skarra has made clothes for one woman at a time. Couture gowns. Knit patterns. Everyday blazers for clients who came to her atelier in Oslo. The work involves a lot of fittings and a lot of conversation, and over time it taught her something that most sizing tools never see: how a woman decides whether a piece of clothing is right for her.
Online, that decision is much harder. Sizes vary between brands. Photographs flatter the garment, not the wearer. Returning things becomes part of how people shop.
Idntfy is Nina's attempt to bring some of what she learned at the atelier to the way most women actually shop now.
The number Idntfy is built around
The Starting Point
Before any investment or any software, Nina was running an informal version of the Idntfy idea inside a coaching community she had built around her label, called Drømmegarderoben. The work was straightforward. She helped each woman audit what she already owned, find a colour palette that suited her, and choose pieces for the life she actually led — not the life a campaign suggested she should.
The women in that community had an average online return rate of around five percent. The industry average is between twenty and forty.
In July 2025, Idntfy opened a live test store. Forty purchases, two returns. Five percent again.
Two separate data sets. The same outcome. It is the number Idntfy works from.
How Nina got here
Nina studied design at the University of the Arts London between 1993 and 1996. She spent the first decade of her career as an art director at advertising agencies in New York, London and Oslo, on accounts including Audi, Shell and Disney.
She founded the Nina Skarra label in 2008 and ran it until 2019. In 2012 she became the first Scandinavian designer to give a solo show at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York. Her gowns have been worn by Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway, Angelina Jolie and Livia Firth, and have appeared under licence to Warner Bros. in Boardwalk Empire and Grey's Anatomy. Posten Norge featured one of her designs on a Norwegian postage stamp in 2013.
"There's no one-style-fits-all, and there's definitely no one-size-fits-all. After speaking with twenty thousand women about their wardrobes, the same thing kept coming up: most of them had plenty of clothes, and still felt like they had nothing to wear."
— Nina Skarra
Twenty thousand women, one method
The method behind Idntfy started in a coaching practice Nina has been running under her own name for years. The course is called Drømmegarderoben — "the dream wardrobe" — and the work takes place in Norwegian, mostly with women in their thirties to sixties.
It teaches three things, in order. How to audit what you already own. How to find a colour palette that suits you rather than the season. How to put together outfits for the life you actually lead.
Idntfy is the same method, made available to anyone online. The body scan replaces the in-person fitting. The recommendations replace the conversation in the atelier. What stays the same is the assumption underneath all of it: that the woman shopping knows her own life better than any algorithm does, and the job of the product is to help her, not to replace her judgement.
Outside of Idntfy
Responsible Ecosystems Sourcing Platform (RESP)
Nina was a founding member of the Responsible Ecosystems Sourcing Platform (RESP), a UN-aligned working group that brought together luxury houses — Bottega Veneta among them — to develop traceability standards for materials such as exotic leathers and plant fibres. The same work informed what is now becoming EU regulation for sustainable apparel.
She also contributed to the UN project Fiber for the Future, alongside Louis Vuitton and Hermès, focused on protecting endangered ecosystems in Mexico for the indigenous communities who depend on them.
In 2025, Idntfy received a 4 million NOK grant from Innovation Norway's Environmental Technology Scheme, and an additional 4.5 million NOK from private investors.
A short, honest note
What this means for Idnfty
The reason Nina's background matters is mostly practical. The decisions inside Idntfy — what to recommend, how to phrase a size suggestion, when to nudge a buyer to slow down — are made the way they are because the person making them has spent a long time in front of real women trying on real clothes.
The scan is good. The technology works. Neither of those things is the point. The point is that the rules the product follows were written by someone who has been thinking about this work, in one form or another, for a long time.
Take a body scan
The scan takes about a minute. The video is deleted immediately. The data is never sold.
Nina Skarra is the founder of IDNTFY me AS, a Norwegian limited company registered in Oslo (org. no. 931 924 818). She holds a BA in Design from the University of the Arts London. She is the author of Nina Skarra Strikkebok (Cappelen Damm, 2017) and a founding member of the Responsible Ecosystems Sourcing Platform.