Intelistyle: The A.I. Fashion Stylist

Intelistyle is a personal fashion stylist chatbot that uses Artificial Intelligence to help you find the perfect outfit for any occasion tailored to your style, bodytype and skintone.

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Intelistyle is a fashion tech startup that personalises the customer experience of fashion retailers by styling their customers with the right clothes and outfits for them while optimising conversion, basket size and repeat purchase rate. It’s AI learns by crawling the web for fashion photography and styles customers based on the latest regional trends, as well as the customer’s bodytype, hair, skin tone and personal style.

Retailers use its AI both online and in-store to provide an omnichannel experience. Some use it to supercharge their customer service team by turning them into stylists. Others use it for product recommendations on the web, chatbots, CRM and smart mirrors.

Intelistyle’s proprietary AI outperforms academic research and understands customer style preferences so well that it recently outperformed human stylists at London Fashion Week. Its fashion specific personalisation delivers 130% more revenue than generic personalisation solutions.

The initial idea for Intelistyle came from the founder’s challenge to find the right outfit when shopping. Way too often we’re inundated with so many different clothes online or in-store with little advice as to what suits us and our body type. In fact, 1 in 2 adults are looking for styling advice when shopping but its availability is currently limited to VIPs only due to the cost of providing that advice through trained stylists. The idea of getting free personalized style advice at the press of a button really appealed to him and he embarked on a journey to explore whether AI could extract the essence of style and scale personal styling to everyone.

After the Intelistyle founders visited Hong Kong and Dubai they were blown away by the usage of WeChat and WhatsApp there. Sales assistants of brands like MaxMara and D&G were interacting with their customers directly and on a regular basis through messaging apps and would help them find the right products for them. After talking to the floor managers, they saw that one of their biggest challenges was how to scale this experience, that due to its labour-intensive nature, is reserved for the VIP customers. The answer was obvious. A chatbot supported by AI styling can help these brands scale their styling team and serve more customers at a fraction of the cost. Delivering it through a conversational interface has the potential to make the experience feel as if you’re talking to a trained stylist in real life.

As a first step, they validated the idea with their existing customers who were thrilled to trial a service like this in their stores. MaxMara in Dubai already signed up to use a WhatsApp chatbot in their flagship store and the biggest luxury retailer in Hong Kong will use Intelistyle in their WeChat mini-program (confidential). The Facebook messenger hackathon was a great way to explore one of the most popular messaging channels, create a prototype that can showcase what is possible on the platform and be later used commercially with existing clients.

One of the biggest challenges of the hackathon was how to package a styling experience into a chatbot. We needed to understand the physical experience of styling a customer face to face and how that can be adapted to create a great conversational experience with a chatbot. Using our industry knowledge and enlisting the help of our in-house stylists, as a starting point, we narrowed down the experience to two main use cases. Looking to get dressed for a particular occasion or finding the right clothes for your characteristics (bodytype, skintone, etc.). After a few iterations, we ended up with a customer journey that looks pretty much like an interaction with a human stylist. The chatbot will ask you the same questions that a professional stylist would and will then find the right clothes for you.

Once we nailed the customer journey, we used a third party platform (flowxo) for prototyping and testing. We then connected the chatbot to our award-winning AI, that would search from a database of thousands of garments to surface the right products for each user.

Allowing free-form exploration of the different styling use cases by the users VS using a more prescriptive flow is a challenge that we see coming up again and again when developing bots. Due to the limited time, we decided to follow a guided approach to ensure a robust user journey. Future explorations will enhance the user experience with more flows and freeform interactions.

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