A year after announcing the $50 million seed funding, the AI shopping platform co-founded by Daydream – e-commerce veteran Julie Bornstein launched for the US public on Wednesday.
This site is the most important effort for fashion retailers to rethink online shopping through the capabilities of large language models that underlie AI tools such as ChatGPT. If other retailers typically deploy AI chatbots as add-ons on their sites, and they rely primarily on regular navigation dropdowns and search bars, the Daydream experience is primarily in the chat window.
AI can handle open-ended queries and take context into account when providing product matches. Bornstein said in a press demonstration on Tuesday that one of the team's favorite examples by early users of the test was the “salt burn” vibe and wedding revenge dress in Paris,” referring to the 2023 film.
Shoppers can further refine their results at text prompts or view similar items by clicking the “more” button that appears on each product. This can be further adjusted with a written prompt. Click “Say More” on a black t-shirt and type in the field provided to display a version of another color, and a list of shirts of the same style will return a list of that color.
Like the previous startups of Bornstein, The Yes, acquired by Pinterest in 2022, personalization plays a key role in Daydream. First-time visitors complete a style profile that includes a variety of products, brand preferences and sizes for their preferred price ranges. The homepage has “daily fashion editing” of products tailored to the user's preferences, increasingly personalizing the products that appear, including when searching, as the site learns what they like.
Daydream believes that advanced customization is required to ensure users are looking at products that are relevant to them. The platform already has over 200 retail and brand partners, and has a catalog of nearly 2 million products across more than 8,000 brands. There is no stock itself. Instead, when a shopper finds a product they want to buy, they are taken to the retailer's site to complete the purchase, and Daydream earns a fee for the sale.
Like many other AI startups, Daydream relies on open source AI models released by some of the major players in the space, such as Openai and Google. The company plans to continue tweaking AI for fashion retail only and upgrading its capabilities, ensuring that it uses off-the-shelf models with minimal tweaks to distinguish it from its competitors. It is already preparing a new AI architecture that uses different models in concerts. Each one specializes in a different purpose.
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