18Stitch Fix: Combining The Power Of Artificial Intelligence And Humans To Disrupt Fashion Retail
Stitch Fix, founded in 2011 and based in California, USA, aims to revolutionize fashion retail by acting as a personal stylist, automatically shipping items that it thinks the customer will want to wear.
It does this by asking customers to fill in a survey stating their style preferences, budget and optionally giving the company's stylists access to their social media accounts.
The work of the stylists is augmented by data scientists and artificial intelligence (AI), which aim to provide customers with clothes they will want to wear by analyzing their preferences and comparing them with thousands of other customers who fit their profile.
What Problems Is Artificial Intelligence Helping To Solve?
The proportion of our shopping that we do online is continuing to soar – in the United Kingdom it climbed from 11.6% of total (non-food) retail spending in 2013 to 24.4 in 2017.1
Fashion retailers are uniquely challenged by the relatively high rate of customer returns. They are also obliged to offer both free delivery and returns to compete. This can often add up to a large expense for businesses if their customers order large quantities of clothing to assess at home and end up returning most items.
As well as the cost of shipping and processing returns, this situation can make it difficult for retailers to manage their inventories, and often requires them to be overstocked to be able ...
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