If AI styles the world, will we look better or worse?
Hi friends,
After a relatively long hiatus, 4CJ is back.
Sadly, one of your caring parents (Dana) will be signing off of the newsletter for the time being. Going forward, it’ll just be me (Lea). Two caring parents is without a doubt better than one, and we hope you will mourn accordingly.
This week, in celebration of Prime Day: the future of shopping.
Cherrypick has their [artificially intelligent] ear to the ground on Instagram.
This one makes so much sense. These days, almost every brand has a social media presence, which they use for advertising purposes. This new advertising is not like old advertising: it’s bi-directional. A company says something, and then we say something back: we comment, we use emojis, we like, we react. In other words: “Consumers are literally telling [companies] what products they want.” The trick is to see this information, digest it, and act on it. That’s where Cherrypick comes in: their platform enables companies to move quickly based on what consumers are saying on social via reactive ad campaigns and other marketing maneuvers. A thousand people unexpectedly comment “NEED!!” on a NARS lipstick post and through Cherrypick, Sephora knows it has found a sweet-spot in the market. With the click of a button, they release an ad to nudge new sales leads over the top.
Jobs of the future will live here, but see a list of present employees here for LinkedIn reconnaissance and/or outreach. Also recommend their retail report for casual reading.
Hidden deep in Narrativ’s about us page is this teaser-trailer: “If you’ve got an Excel spreadsheet that rates your sunscreen on 25 different attributes, you’ll do well here.”
Four pieces of information are crucial to understanding why this company is exciting. Let’s stick with the sunscreen idea. (1) If you wanted to buy sunscreen ten years ago, you would have gone to a store like Walmart and chosen from a simple set of human-curated options. But (2) if you want to buy sunscreen today, you go to Amazon, at which point you’re confronted with 30,000 results (test it yourself). What we know is that, (3), in this new internet wilderness, 20% of consumers make an impulsive choice but 80% go down a rabbit hole in pursuit of ideal selection. These consumers scour detailed sunscreen reviews that consider things like zinc oxide presence and viscosity; this means that, (4), more purchases than ever before come through affiliate links. Point being: the way shoppers are presented product options has changed, and thus, the way shoppers make product decisions has changed. Sunscreen companies (et als) want to set themselves up to succeed in this new landscape of the consumer-investigator. Narrativ helps brands transition their digital strategy to do just that, namely by deploying an online infrastructure called SmartLinks.
Narrativ is looking for a product manager, a UX designer, an engineer, and more.
InContext builds 3D simulations of grocery stores and retail.
If you opened a small store — a neighborhood pharmacy, a hipster apothecary — how would you arrange your goods? If you were strategic about it (which you should be), each product placement would take into account the ways that customers wander through your space, the goal being to put the right items in front of the right people and maximize sales. As in: bath bombs may sell better next to nail polish than shampoo (catch the splurging beauty shopper while you can?); they will probably sell better next to nail polish than bathroom cleaning products (very different hygienic processes). If your store carries just 10 items, and if you can put each item in any one of 10 locations around the store, that’s already 10^10 possible layouts. For grocers and retailers with thousands of SKUs, the possibilities are enormous and intimidating: that is why InContext exists. Their software allows store owners to imagine and simulate possible layouts of their inventory; it then provides the infrastructure to gather data on decisions, test performance, and iterate.
InContext is hiring in client development, engineering, and finance.
Last week, I located a very cool men’s polo shirt in Club Monaco and thought, “I wish there was a way to create a Pandora radio for this shirt.” I wanted to be able to run a search and have it pull up not just the same product in different colors, but other garments — shorts and watches and hats — that I might like because I liked the polo.
Fashwell is building this product: a Pandora radio for fashion. They use machine learning and AI to understand the structure, pattern, and style of garments and then provide incredible recommendations. They sell this search engine to retailers and tout improved upsell (you bought a fancier blouse) and cross-sell (you bought the matching shoes) as main value propositions. Their service is convenient because when we are paroozing a store, we are looking for things that fit our style (maybe you are Justin Bieber sloppy or Sophie Turner elegant), but we are forced to use lesser proxies like brand, size, garment type, and product name to filter for the things we want. In other words: the categories do not encompass the complexity, and this causes friction in the shopping process. Fashwell is trying to help shoppers (and brands) eliminate most of it.
Keep a lookout for job postings here. In the meantime, let us know if you think that AI styling the globe will be a net improvement from the status quo.
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Love and prayers for minimal typos in my first solo email,
Lea