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By Vogue Business in collaboration with Stitch Fix
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Personal styling service Stitch Fix has been tweaking the way artificial intelligence is used to understand personal style. Now, the company is building on this generation with a new tool that is helping it “wait for trends” and communicate its stock decisions. Recently at the SXSW convention in Austin, Texas, Loretta Choy, director of merchandising and customer services at Stitch Fix, and Sophie Searcy, director of business algorithms, spoke with Maghan McDowell, chief innovation editor at Vogue Business, about how the company is combining fine art painting and knowledge science awaits trends and spoke for the first time about this new generation.
Choy begins by explaining how Stitch Fix’s business style aims to solve the paradox of selection in e-commerce. “Today’s consumers are very overwhelmed by variety. When you search online, you probably glance at 52 pages or more until you locate one or two articles you like; Then you start browsing sites or searching social media, where you just scroll and scroll and scroll. It’s endless,” he said. Stitch Fix’s algorithms choose the features to be offered to private stylists from its thousands of products; Stylists then use the visitor’s acquisition history, private comments, and private tastes to further refine recommendations manually. It also uses natural language processing to summarize knowledge that is then incorporated into the most recent visitor request note for the stylist. Stitch Fix can get a deeper read on visitors’ private tastes and broader trends through a fun tool called “Style Shuffle,” in which consumers rate potential pieces and outfits.
Personalization algorithms don’t eliminate the ability to respond to external cultural microtrends, Choy added. Instead, stylists can help alleviate the decision-making fatigue that comes with those ephemeral trends (think “cottagecore” or “mab wife”) through trend filtering. through the lens of the client’s personal tastes and demands. For example, prior to the Barbie movie, Stitch Fix saw a three hundred percent increase in requests for “Barbiecore”; There has also been a 1,000-cent increase in requests for “quiet luxury. “”There’s such a dichotomy between other people who need to engage in all of those activities, but at the same time, they’re like, ‘My brain is really tired right now. How can I understand that? Choi said.
Because of its atypical business model, which relies heavily on a “feedback loop” from consumers, Stitch Fix is able to keep up with what Searcy calls “incrementality. “In other words, they can measure whether the sales of a product being promoted better are replacing those of some other potential product and being promoted to existing unwavering consumers (which would ultimately be sales-neutral) or whether the product being promoted better fills a new need or attracts a new visitor (which would ultimately mean expanding). sales). The goal is, of course, to increase sales.
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That’s a credit over classic retailers, Searecy said. “When you look at functionality and a product comes off the shelves in a classic retail environment, you don’t know if it’s doing well with your core consumers or if it’s doing well with a new segment of visitors. It’s the difference between anything that’s “nice to have” and anything that’s literally progressively positive.
Stitch Fix has built on this wisdom by sharing this data with a partner brand portal and informing its personal label business, which it plans to expand. You can percentage data on major points like style, fabric, price, and fit, all the time. to parasols, such as spaces where the garment may be too tight or too loose. He collaborated with denim specialist Pistola to launch two exclusive brands and has also done so with many others. ” It allows them to not only grow with us, but also expand their own brands,” Choy said.
After perfecting its advice system, used by both stylists and consumers, Stitch Fix created an advice engine that its merchants can use to inform decisions about actions. This includes data about products that can be redeemed and opportunities in the collection that can be completed through personal tag pieces. or pieces designed in conjunction with partner brands. Choy, who oversees the stock and styles that Stitch Fix’s stylists have access to, and Searcy, who is guilty of the customization algorithms that deliver the right styles to the right people at the right time, have worked intensively in combination on this newest technology.
To build it, Searcy’s team necessarily reverse-engineered the recommendation formula to create a simulator that expected what would be presented to each visitor in the long run. The sales team can then get a long-term demand concept, even up to 12 months in advance. It is capable of traversing billions of imaginable scenarios in a way that would be humanly unimaginable.
This is especially useful for parts that are less obvious to the sales team; A graphic T-shirt, for example, worked well and the retailer’s team was not susceptible to buying this item again. However, the simulator had a greater understanding and knew that for some customers, this item satisfied a desire that no other item in stock can simply fill up.
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Naturally, the ideal combination also makes its way into the human frame, Choy said; Machines can’t wait for adjustments like pandemics or the impact of movie releases. In fact, Searcy says some of the highest-value learnings are gained once the human business team identifies everything that’s missing from the simulator.
“One of our main steps is to reduce the time it takes us to go from concept to, hopefully, deciding to invest in a style, so that time is as short as possible,” Searcy said. Stitch Fix is already making plans to check out new parts through Style Shuffle, which means asking for feedback on parts that aren’t already in their inventory. Ultimately, Choy added, this is helping to reduce waste while driving better sales. “We need to make sure we’re generating the most productivity in everything we buy,” he said.
Since introducing the prediction tool, the company has noticed great functionality in the parts suggested through the tool. “When the tool is used to propose styles, we have noticed the first signs that our consumers love them and our stylists choose them. These are encouraging signs that the parts we are buying are succeeding,” Searcy said.
Comments, questions or suggestions? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness. com.
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By Vogue Business in association with BigCommerce