In recent years, the world of fashion has been rapidly digitized. Between virtual showrooms and pandemic-enhanced online shopping, fashion retailers have had to adapt to the needs of their customers.
One of the industry’s biggest challenges was getting shoppers to buy the items in their cart. This can be difficult for customers who can’t imagine what their clothing or accessories will look like on themselves rather than on a model.StyleScan Inc. offers artificial intelligence-powered visualization technology to enhance the online shopping experience. We are trying to change that by making it better.
Based in Brentwood with a primary studio in Van Nuys, the company was founded in 2018 by Larissa Posner. Posner holds a certificate in the business of his applications in machine learning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has been advising investors in companies for over a decade. relationship and strategy. Posner also spent time working as a model for his catalogue.
While working at quantitative finance in 2018, Posner found he didn’t have time to shop in physical stores and noticed that some stores were closing. She considered it a “retail apocalypse.”
“Barneys closed on the Upper West Side next to my house. increase. “People are now shopping online instead of in physical stores.At the same time, I looked at Shopify and a few other platforms and the stock price is going up and they are doing great. However, we must assume that convenience will be overtaken and e-commerce will be the future.So what can we do now to build the products that the market will need later?”
Posner said he would like to be his customer. She came up with the idea of uploading a photo of herself so she could show herself in her retailer’s inventory. She gathered a group of her computer scientists, venture capitalists, her fashion executives and developed her technology in her virtual dressing.
Posner visited the financial services team at Corporate Profile, an investor relations firm representing publicly traded biotech, technology, and financial services companies, to see if stock prices could be predicted, and how women’s sizes could be predicted. , asked if I could show it to a woman.
“The answer was yes. There are many breakthroughs in computer vision and AI today. You can superimpose one photo over another and pull out a piece of clothing,” Posner said. increase. “You have to train and build neural networks and train algorithms.
That’s when things got serious.
Usage
StyleScan image processing technology takes 2D photos of clothing and accessories and transforms them into 3D volumetric meshes that can be superimposed on people of various shapes and sizes.
Posner said the technology could be used to make some sectors of the fashion industry more sustainable and cost-effective. One of them is traditional photography.
“For example, a photograph of a garment on a mannequin. Now that garment can be shown in each size rather than in one sample size. You can,” Posner said. “And it’s all digital. And the cost, you can’t compare the costs.”
The StyleScan team surveyed 12 apparel companies ranging in size from small to large to find out how much it costs to shoot an e-commerce photo shoot. For smaller retailers, a final image of him costs about $50, while large luxury brands pay up to $1,000 for a single image of him.
“With StyleScan, it costs as much as a bottle of water,” says Posner.
In addition to being cost-effective and sustainable, retailers using their technology see increased sales and conversion rates, Posner said.
The company offers two types of services: model switches and style switches. The first is that the customer is on the retailer’s site where he chooses one item and chooses from different models to visualize the piece.
“Our next product is Style Switch, where you can dress a model into an item from a retailer’s inventory selection, become your own stylist, build the complete look, and even create a kind of preview before you buy. ‘ she said.
who benefits
Clients who may be looking to use the company’s technology choose from a list of subscription tiers based on volume and number of models required for their site.
“Do they want just one item, one model, or one item in multiple sizes and multiple skin tones? It’s also based on how you want to be relevant, and it has to be fairly integrated into your partner’s e-comm.The integration is just for us who manage your Shopify account.”
The company is an official partner of Shopify. The client grants access to Shopify and uploads the images included in the subscription package.
StyleScan will also offer different layered models.
“Maybe someone will become an influencer with some following, and that will be something you can access with your higher premium package,” Posner said. That’s exactly what our premium crème de la crème package is.”
After using StyleScan for 30 days, jewelry seller Millianna saw a 93% increase in conversion rate and a 367% increase in total sales.
“Usually they photographed the earrings with a white background and nothing else. And what they found was that consumers came to the site and couldn’t visualize the item. This How big are the earrings? Where do they hit? So customers can go to Google and start researching products and lose customers,” says Posner.
“In StyleScan, we added a magic button ‘Virtual model try-on’. Now you can see it on different women with different skin tones and you can look at the item and visualize how big it is. ”
Posner said it’s important that it doesn’t operate as a black-box company where customers send photos of clothing and download output images.
“We have professional designers on our staff, professional stylists (and) professional creative directors, so it’s like cyborgs with humans operating the software and humans controlling the quality of everything presented to the client. It’s something,” says Posner. He said. “Make sure there are no aesthetic oversights in the software results.”
The intersection of technology and fashion creates a lot of uncharted territory, but Posner says tech companies and decision makers will always have to figure out how to navigate these changes in their industry. He said it would be a learning curve.
Posner also said she is proud that her clients have seen StyleScan’s direct impact on their business and are even more excited to work with them.
“Since we started…we are already seeing customers come back, double their subscriptions, upgrade and want more SKUs per month…enhanced by style. We are now seeing efficacy data as well as aesthetic improvements,” Posner said.
