VLT merges AI and fashion with new 'Shop You' app

Malaysian innovation, product and design firm, VLT, has developed "Shop You", an artificial intelligence (AI) powered retail and fashion app. This is in partnership with Australia-based fashion-tech entrepreneurs Kelly Slessor and Emma Sharley.Among the list of 30 Australian and international brands that the app has already partnered with include Witchery, Spell, Uniqlo, Ellery and Cotton On.Shop You personalises each shopping experience by matching consumers' needs to what they would actually buy. In addition, the app is able to personalise end-to-end customer journeys with visual intelligence and fashion insights, through AI and data from searches and purchasing behaviours. This allows it to continuously learn about a shopper and its buying habits.The experience begins with the on-boarding process which seeds the user's initial preferences in the backend. This is followed by the recommendation engine which progressively filters the user's preferred brands and applies other contextual information such as product categories, colour and body type.The recommendation process is further enhanced with Natural Language input by processing and understanding a user's input form the app's chat window. A personalised list of products recommendations will be curated, which looks to increase the success rate of the user arriving at his or her desired outfit. The user is then able to easily purchase the product through the app via the fashion retailer's website.Meanwhile for retailers, VLT also designed an automation algorithm for data import to simplify and scale the data-entry of products into the system. This ensures that the latest designs are made available to the user as soon as it is released online, regardless of the labels available.Adrian Lim, CEO of VLT, said that the benefits of such predictive technology allows retailers to reach customers and convert them at a higher rate."We wanted to find a way to mitigate the hassle of both shopping and staying in style and developed the requirements needed to achieve this for Shop You. The AI powered app, cleverly learns the shopper’s DNA and narrows down searches, suggesting predicted preferences instead of bombarding the shopper with unnecessary recommendations,” Lim added.