"Freedom from the fitting room." That's the tag line of MyShape, an online retail store that helps women find clothing to match their body shapes.

The freedom comes from individual online product recommendations based not only on customers' personal feedback, but also on comments from its community of shoppers.

Each customer creates what MyShape calls a Personal Shop. They build a profile in their Personal Shop by selecting from seven body shapes, inputting their measurements, and citing their style preferences. MyShape combines that data using a patented algorithm, and then can make near-perfect product recommendations for each customer, which it displays in the Personal Shops.

According to Mercedes De Luca, chief experience officer and CIO of MyShape, what resonates with customers is that the recommendations consider their shapes, measurements, and style preferences holistically. "We go through the garments and show them the ones that fit their preferences," De Luca says.

In addition to personalization, MyShape offers a social media component supported by technology vendor Baynote. While a customer shops for, say, jeans or a skirt in her Personal Shop, the engine will also recommend related items that other visitors have purchased. By displaying products that have been proven to be interesting to like-minded shoppers, the system avoids the pitfalls of more traditional searches by observing how users interact with the products they discover, not simply the keywords they type.

De Luca says the functionality gives women even more choices and helps them find other items of related interest. "On many sites, you see personal recommendations...We think there is wisdom in the crowds," she says.

De Luca says MyShape saw a lift in sales in excess of 16 percent after the first 30 days of using Baynote. "We've been growing by leaps and bounds and have a lot of exciting social initiatives on the roadmap," she says. "This is really resonating with women."