Growing from 0 to 4M users on our fashion app with vertical machine learning

[thisisit]

What is interesting to me is that this comes on a day when Bloomberg says "Americans are spending less on clothing". Full discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16322720

[ryanianian]

Combining the ideas of both posts: You can spend less if you buy more targeted-to-you and higher-quality items that you'll wear more often. Finding these items and customers is a data (and marketing) problem.

E.g. I spend less overall than I did a few years ago but each item I buy is more expensive. I've learned the value in quality clothes. I give smaller batches of more money to well-picked retailers rather than lots of small batches of money to big-name mass-market retailers.

An app that capitalizes on people coming to this realization (and knows how to market and execute it well) could make a killing.

[dna_polymerase]

Such trends may affect the big players, but for small emerging companies there is still much market share to gain from competitors.

[greenred123]

I hope that the company will also focus on employing women and raising the numbers of women in tech! :-) Given that the user base is female, it would make sense and bring the company value to have a diverse workplace.

[DoreenMichele]

Here is a nice detail about their process:

We launched an extremely early alpha of Chicisimo with one key functionality. We launched under another name and in another country. You couldn’t even upload photos… but it allowed us to iterate with real data and get a lot of qualitative input. At some point, we launched the real Chicisimo, and removed this alpha from the App Store.

Just yesterday I was wondering where to begin searching for clothing related apps to see what is available in this space. Glad to see this article.

[aldamiz]

About clothing apps, here are some ideas.

There are teams focusing on the social aspect and grow via influencers. I’d think about utilities (help me do something):

- Help me decide what to wear: Chicisimo, Pinterest and (believe me) Google Images;

- Help me manage my wardobre: Stylebook, Glamoutfit;

- Help me be seen by others: Wear app, Lookbook and Chictopia (this last two worked really well on desktop);

- Help me decide what to buy: ecommerce apps obvsly, or Liketoknowit; or the second-hang category of which several are working really well, and are more widely known.

- Help me get feedback from my friends, no one really working I think, or feedback from the system (Echo Look -> Spark). And a new related category popping up: get feedback from a stylist with an in-app purchase model or even subscription; Wishi, Daam are some examples. This last category will be interesting to follow.

- Polyvore - outfits ensembling;

- Rent the Runway, Stitch Fix, Instagram obvsly. And I'm sure I'm missing many, but just trying to give you ideas of how to find inspiring apps.

I wonder if online fashion is like online music in 2005/6/7... with lots of noise, some tech focused products, and the spotify's of the world starting to be built. Fun times.

[waytogo]

OT: This type of article ('how we hit the goldmine with xy') is always tempting to read but eventually a disappointment.

If someone had the plan to the goldmine why should he disclose it?

[pencilcode]

What is the current state of the art for finding similar images? Is it auto-encoders nn's, convnets and then just use some sort of distance measure?

[2_listerine_pls]

That bullshit patent

[whoisjuan]

I really love how machine learning makes something mundane but yet exhausting, into something seamless and enjoyable.

[uptownfunk]

Vertical ML is so 2017, it’s all about diagonal ML

[senatorobama]

Would you accept someone who has already has a FT job and wants to make more $ by doing remote on the side?

[Toast_25]

I'm sad there's not a version of Chicisimo for guys :(

[amelius]

So they made a search-engine based on deep learning for a specific (but quite large) target group.

How long do they think it will take Google to catch up, if they haven't already?

[leereeves]

Is this target market big enough to interest Google?

[danvoell]

Was this the main point of the story? - "At some point, we were lucky to get noticed by the App Store team, and we’ve been featured as App of the Day throughout the world"

[billmalarky]

I read an interesting story on how to build a modern data-based product.

[robocat]

No. From the data they gave, getting featured in the app store added about ~5,000 to their 4 million users (957,437 unique views from featuring in the app store, 0,5% conversion).

[ztoben]

That's kind of the impression I got too. Build a nice looking app and hope that Apple throws you a bone I guess.

[asimpletune]

They’re growing women with their app?!

[williamdclt]

Is that really of any importance here?

[tytytytytytytyt]

Is this comment contributing anything?