Stitch Fix CEO Katrina Lake Predicts AI’s Impact On Fashion

Everyone talks about, and agonizes over, Amazon’s effect on the retail industry. And for good reason. But there’s a smaller, yet still mighty, transformation rippling through the industry that brands are bending to accommodate, and that’s the Stitch Fix effect. CEO Katrina Lake is spearheading the future of personalization in fashion, a point of obsession for brands and retailers that know they can no longer offer up a generic user experience and still win. And while every apparel brand desperately wants to get to know the person buying and wearing its clothes on a more intimate level, Stitch Fix was modeled on the premise. It established a new type of retailer that asked customers for insights and feedback alongside their size and color preference for items, even the ones customers didn’t like or buy, in exchange for a clear value proposition. Stitch Fix, for its members, would eliminate the need to go out and shop for clothes. The machinations of the Stitch Fix model rely on a combination of data science — machine learning, AI and natural language processing — and human stylists; on top of complex customer profiles built by data, stylists can layer the nuances of buying and wearing clothes. Striking that balance has led the company to its IPO. and to nearly $1 billion in revenue in 2017. Read more at Digiday.