When Julie Bornstein is a leader in e-commerce Nordstrom In the early 2000s, she envisioned a world where online shopping one day would live up to the hope of bringing a truly personalized experience to every shopper.
“I just remember one day I wanted to build a search and discovery platform that only helps you find the right thing,” she told her. wealth In an interview earlier this month.
In the next few decades, the executive role at Nordstrom City Clothing,,,,, Sephorastitching repair, as the founder of a fashion startup, she sold it to Pinterest In 2022, Bornstein approaches her goal.
But on Wednesday, Bornstein, 52, unveiled what she believes is the most complete performance of her vision for 25 years to date. it Adventure in the form of AI-driven fashion discovery and shopping market DaydreamBeta started a year after Bornstein first announced a $50 million seed investment.
“It’s the climax of everything I’ve seen and done,” Bernstein said. “I’ve just been waiting for this technology to catch up.”
For Bornstein, the first seeds of daydreaming By 2022, when Chatgpt suddenly enters the scene, it begins training Internet users with written queries that (in conversational vernacular) can produce subtle and detailed answers and suggestions, and provides suggestions powered by large language models or LLMS.
Now, Bornstein’s daydream is trying to beat many existing fashion brands and retailers, as well as chatbots that discover new fashion outfits in low friction and highly personalized ways by creating online experiences, such as Chatgpt and Cllexity. Whoever cracked this first can leverage the strengths of the first-in-command to build a difficult flywheel that is highly involved in large consumers, attracting partner brands and retailers who don’t want to miss out on new growth channels.
At launch, customers who navigate to Daydream.ing (there is no app yet) are first greeted with a series of biographical questions (name, date of birth, gender), followed by queries concerning their sizing, favorite brands, and budgets (The fact that the cheapest budget range extends up to $150 says something about the high-end customer that Daydream appears to be targeting.) Customers are then prompted for a query: “Tell me, what’s the event, mood or the product you shop today?” (New users can skip a brief introductory survey as needed and then skip it.)
This problem is accompanied by a large box to be entered, which seems to be deliberately designed to cause queries that are not only a simple keyword search. In this short test by reporters, the system quickly produced a pretty good effect for some queries – and followed up commands when prompted: “Look for sneakers I can wear, wear kids sports games, but also get out of the way in a medium fantasy dinner.”
Once a query is typed, the system quickly generates a large number of product images, each displayed in rectangular tiles, which account for two-thirds of the page.
Daydream agents (or chat experience) move it to the left side of the screen and ask questions, trying to prompt feedback to narrow down the results further (users can also take advantage of the products they like and ask for similar products at different price points, or provide other types of feedback like “I like this style but would like to see different fabrics.”
To purchase the item, you can click on the retailer or brand’s own website from Daydream. (In the future, Bornstein plans to complete transactions on behalf of customers on their partner’s shopping websites.) The fact is that the transactions take place on the brand or retailer’s website, not on Daydream, is one of the reasons why Bornstein believes so many brands and multi-brand retailers work with them at launch.
“You can see us as a threat to them, but not them,” Bernstein said. “Everyone is tired of relying on it so much.” Google and Facebook for New users. ”
Daydream has registered about 200 partners so far, most of which are clothing brands Nike To Madewell, and luxury labels like Chloe to 15 multi-brand retailers in Khaite, including Nordstrom and Net-a-Porter. When daydream users continue to buy from them, the startup charges them a referral fee, although Bornstein does not offer specific cuts. She does allow them to have a range of 5% to 10% above the member network referral fee, but it is below some fees charged by the luxury market, which could be more than 30%.
These partner brands and retailers provide startups with their product catalog data, then daydreaming, and then enriching with other attributes to help their AI agents come up with high-quality suggestions to answer subtle questions. At startup, the daydream results are affected by approximately twelve small language models, each addressing certain properties of the product, such as color or fabric.
Bornstein believes that while all AI chat and search experiences, such as Chatgpt or Cherplexity or Gemini experiences, are likely to be popular, as product-related searches in categories like TVS or Hairdryers are easily welcomed, with tips and answers for these searches often centered on specifications rather than style and taste. But she also believes that generation and broker AI have impacted shopping so quickly that it is not clear what breakthroughs will be next, and it is not long.
“I think the way e-commerce is going is hard to imagine,” Bernstein said. “What we are building today is a bridge between the past and where we are moving forward.”
