
Growing from 0 to 4M users on our fashion app with vertical machine learning - aldamiz
https://medium.com/@aldamiz/f8b7fc0a89d7
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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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16322720)

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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.

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JohnJamesRambo
But aren't you wearing the same thing over and over? What's the point of
quality clothes people see so often they think it is dirty or that you own
three shirts? I just buy cheap clothes.

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ryanianian
3 is probably too few. People don't really pay that much attention to what you
wear, I promise.

I usually wear my shirts twice and take them to the dry-cleaner after. I'll
only go once if it's been a hot day or if the shirt has dirt/stains. Maybe 3
times if I didn't wear it all day.

Plus I have about 7 pairs of high-quality pants that work well in an office
and are comfortable for weekends. Most shirts go with most pants. So I have
like 70 outfits so it really doesn't feel limiting, especially if you add in a
few sweaters, jackets, and shoes to bring the combinations way up.

I did the math on this once to figure out cost-per-wear of my shirts. I kept
rough track of how many times I wore a favorite shirt of mine before tossing
it. Roughly 100 times. The shirt was like $120. I paid about $0.75 per wear in
drycleaning. So like $1.75/wear.

(I could wash and iron for myself to bring this way down to like $1/wear but I
hate ironing so I just pay the drycleaner - I also could have gone another 50
or so wears but I spilled coffee on it and I could always see the stain even
though nobody else could I'm sure.)

Compare that with a cheap H&M shirt I bought a few years ago for like $40 -
I've worn it twice and don't look forward to wearing it again since it doesn't
fit as well and is a bit too trendy in its style for me. Cost is like
$20/wear. Save your money and buy higher-quality clothes :)

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jakeway
Your H&M example isn't great. The reason you didn't wear it a lot isn't
because of the quality, but because you bought a shirt you didn't like. Save
your money and only buy clothing you like.

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ryanianian
That's a very good point! You'll save a _lot_ of money by being selective
about what you buy.

I think I got suckered into the H&M marketing - it looked quite nice in store
and it even felt nice the first time I wore it. But then I realized it only
really went with one or two other things, and it didn't look quite as good
after being dry-cleaned/washed, so it quickly lost most of its appeal.

~~~
gregcoombe
> it didn't look quite as good after being dry-cleaned/washed

This is another reason to spend more money on clothes: quality materials look
good as they age. I bought a Old Navy pullover which only lasted 2-3 washes
before pilling like crazy.

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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.

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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.

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Toast_25
I'm assuming you're a woman, so forgive me if I'm wrong, but do you know if
these apps work well for men's fasion? I think I have OK taste, but I'd like
to get good.

~~~
aldamiz
I'm a man:) Sorry I don't know about fashion apps for men. I feel teams are
building the infrastructure focusing on the big opportunity (women's fashion).
Then, expanding to other categories will be way easier.

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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?

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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?

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2_listerine_pls
That bullshit patent

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

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

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

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Toast_25
I'm sad there's not a version of Chicisimo for guys :(

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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?

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leereeves
Is this target market big enough to interest Google?

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mtarnovan
Yes. We're talking fashion, so a pretty big market.

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leereeves
We're not talking "fashion". Not the whole industry. Just the market for an
app like this.

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mtarnovan
Arguably everyone interested in fashion could be interested in an app like
this.

~~~
leereeves
And arguably everyone interested in reading could be interested in Google
Reader, but even that didn't interest Google.

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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"

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

~~~
hk__2
What’s a non-data-based product?

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hello_newman
one that doesn't leverage AI/ML as a core piece of functionality

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asimpletune
They’re growing women with their app?!

