Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Brands are competing to
Speaker 1: win over holiday shoppers this season, as they always do,
Speaker 1: with some retailer returning to AI know lest to combat
Speaker 1: higher costs. Joining us to discuss this now is Michelle Bacherox,
Speaker 1: founder and CEO of find Mine, an AI styling technology,
Speaker 1: And Michelle have to ask you to start with, how
Speaker 1: do you know me?
Speaker 2: So?
Speaker 1: Well? I hold off on clicking if I can onto things,
Speaker 1: and I try to be pretty good about not accepting
Speaker 1: extra cookies and so on, and yet I seem to
Speaker 1: be targeted with the exact style that I would go
Speaker 1: and pick. What are you doing at find mine and
Speaker 1: other places to have that happen?
Speaker 3: Well, clearly you and I are being targeted the same
Speaker 3: because I got the memo with bread today. So you know,
Speaker 3: retailers and brands are always trying to provide better service
Speaker 3: to their customers. What find Mind does is actually help
Speaker 3: elevate your style sensibility through the lens of the brand.
Speaker 3: So if you think about all the millions of people
Speaker 3: out doing last minute Christmas shopping right now, they might
Speaker 3: be walking by a beautiful window display that's very curated
Speaker 3: and inspirational it's really hard to do that online. And
Speaker 3: so what find Mind does is AREI trains uniquely on
Speaker 3: what the brand's editorial point of view is, so we
Speaker 3: can deeply understand how that brand wants to elevate your
Speaker 3: sense of style, and then we can do that at
Speaker 3: scale by showing for every single individual product exactly how
Speaker 3: to wear it, and not just how to wear it,
Speaker 3: but how to wear it in all the different cores
Speaker 3: and trends and things that are happening on TikTok and
Speaker 3: very of the moment.
Speaker 1: So some of your brands include gap ATLTA, Old Navy,
Speaker 1: you know the parts of Gap Packson, Grayson Men's Warehouse,
Speaker 1: and so on. So you have a lot of retailers
Speaker 1: out there. Are you saying that you take their vision
Speaker 1: and have its style itself, or are you adding things
Speaker 1: to it? Or are you putting together customers personal information
Speaker 1: with the brand style.
Speaker 3: It's a mix of all of the above, honestly, and
Speaker 3: I feel like that's really the holy grail. Personalization with
Speaker 3: such a big topic in retail for a long time,
Speaker 3: and retail technology when really hard and deep on personalization.
Speaker 3: But what ends up happening is that if you just
Speaker 3: follow the pattern of what the customer buys. They never
Speaker 3: really get better, they never become more stylish. We all
Speaker 3: stay stuck in our rut, whereas what the brand has
Speaker 3: is this sort of unique aspirational view for how stylish
Speaker 3: you could be right, and that actually helps you become
Speaker 3: a better customer for them too, because you come back
Speaker 3: and buy more frequently. So it's fine mine. What we're
Speaker 3: doing is we are personalizing to then consumer, but we're
Speaker 3: helping the brand's editorial vision for how you can be
Speaker 3: a more stylish person come through so that you end
Speaker 3: up coming back and buying more frequently. In fact, we
Speaker 3: increase eight percent the repeat purchase rate of customers coming
Speaker 3: back to these sites, which in retail, you know most
Speaker 3: customers visit a website once and never come back, and
Speaker 3: you might not even be profitable on the first visit.
Speaker 3: So that has a really big impact on the bottom
Speaker 3: line of these brands.
Speaker 2: When you're talking to brands, how do they kind of
Speaker 2: navigate some of these forces? For example, you're talking about
Speaker 2: how do you know me so well? For me, I'm
Speaker 2: a total sucker for Instagram shopping and I don't mind
Speaker 2: being told so much about what I might like usually
Speaker 2: I do, and they're getting they're finding, they're finding you
Speaker 2: one one way or another. And so if you think about,
Speaker 2: you know, how they navigate this social media atmosphere too,
Speaker 2: and the way people are buying maybe differently. Then you know,
Speaker 2: I grew up in Paramuse, New Jersey. It's kind of
Speaker 2: like the main country of malls here in the United's
Speaker 2: likes the main city of malls. But you know, I
Speaker 2: can't remember the last time I went there, So how
Speaker 2: do you navigate the different ways people are buying online?
Speaker 3: You know, people like clamor to online in the industry
Speaker 3: because they were like, Wow, what an expensive way relatively
Speaker 3: to having all this real estate. But actually, what people
Speaker 3: are finding is that online is very expensive to operate,
Speaker 3: not just from a cost of you know, hosting and
Speaker 3: infrastructure and engineering resources and all the things that go
Speaker 3: into it, but customer acquisition costs is crazy high. Facebook
Speaker 3: and Google or Meta and Google are getting insane amounts
Speaker 3: of money from these brands and retailers to acquire those customers.
Speaker 3: And so one of the things that we're helping these
Speaker 3: brands to do is is cacbust to avoid having to
Speaker 3: pay a paid advertisement by getting in on the organic
Speaker 3: conversations that are happening on social by being on trend
Speaker 3: and sort of the moment so that we can capture
Speaker 3: your attention, we can target you. It's meaningful and you
Speaker 3: don't mind, you know, getting targeted that way. You're getting
Speaker 3: something that's helpful for you. But at the same time
Speaker 3: not losing all this money to Facebook and not losing
Speaker 3: all this money to Google, because you're just part of
Speaker 3: the organic conversation that people want to be having on
Speaker 3: these social channels.
Speaker 2: Okay, so what role do celebrities play because I don't
Speaker 2: think it was just Beyonce this year, but the cowboy
Speaker 2: chic came back in a big, big way. And so
Speaker 2: do you see that capitalizing on what Taylor Swift, what
Speaker 2: Beyonce and what other kind of major celebrities have been
Speaker 2: doing has been a big part of the story for
Speaker 2: those brands to capitalize on what people want.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. I mean, Blake Lively showed up to the Super
Speaker 3: Bowl earlier this year and an Adidas tracksuit with this
Speaker 3: crop top and it wasn't available on the site. I mean,
Speaker 3: what a what a missed opportunity. So I think that
Speaker 3: celebrities do these drive bys. I mean People used to
Speaker 3: talk about Oprah on her live show, mentioning a website
Speaker 3: and that website would crash it was an Oprah drive by.
Speaker 3: You have to be ready for those celebrity drive bys
Speaker 3: to capitalize on that trend, and that might mean shopping
Speaker 3: your own inventory as a brand. A lot of brands
Speaker 3: aren't like she, and they're not able to react and produce,
Speaker 3: you know, cowboy core stuff immediately if they don't already
Speaker 3: have it an inventory, but a lot of it. A
Speaker 3: lot of the style comes down to the combination. Right.
Speaker 3: You might have jeans, you might have boots, you might
Speaker 3: have flannel shirt, and just by putting them together and
Speaker 3: pairing them and creating a quick landing page, that's your
Speaker 3: cowboy core landing page. You can capitalize on that trend
Speaker 3: where you know you might have manpower to do that
Speaker 3: for every single trend. People might not be working sheltering
Speaker 3: an inventory.
Speaker 1: I should do I should chuck my own inventory instead
Speaker 1: of buying new Do you have a ready boyre? I
Speaker 1: have way too too much. I'm surprised I also have
Speaker 1: too much? Helbig or what is your opinion on fashion? AI?
Speaker 1: Fashion models? Because they've been quite there's been a lot
Speaker 1: of talk about them, whether they're a good thing, whether
Speaker 1: they're not so great a thing, whether.
Speaker 3: They even work absolutely. I think there's two main issues
Speaker 3: with AI fashion models. One is sort of the rights issues.
Speaker 3: You know, models don't want their beauty training the AI
Speaker 3: and then using that to put them out of a job, right,
Speaker 3: That's that's a double whammy of bad for fashion models.
Speaker 3: And then there's also issues around sort of you know,
Speaker 3: unrealistic and unattainable beauty standards, which are already sort of
Speaker 3: unrealistic and unattainable from what we're seeing on Instagram, but
Speaker 3: it's just taken to this next level. So there's that
Speaker 3: societal ill that might be coming down the pike with
Speaker 3: these models. So that's kind of one camp. The other
Speaker 3: side of things is the quality. So the AI is
Speaker 3: not high enough quality yet to produce something that is
Speaker 3: photorealistic without what they call hallucinations, and in AI parlance,
Speaker 3: that might be a sixth finger, it might be the
Speaker 3: eye that's a little droopy, the you know, skin tones
Speaker 3: that don't match because they're Frankenstein monstering together parts of
Speaker 3: people to take one you know, humanoid looking thing. So
Speaker 3: those all those issues will get resolved, you know, in
Speaker 3: the next couple of years. But for the meantime, for
Speaker 3: what Fine Mine does, We're producing assets that are seen
Speaker 3: by one hundred million consumers a month, and most of
Speaker 3: those assets are getting produced in real time, so there's
Speaker 3: no market.
Speaker 1: Find Mine, Michelle. You've raised something like almost twenty million
Speaker 1: dollars by now, which is you know, great going. You've
Speaker 1: been around for a few years. What's the plan for
Speaker 1: the next stage four? Fine Mind? Because there must be
Speaker 1: other companies out there competing with you, absolutely, and.
Speaker 3: I think that one of the big things that I
Speaker 3: talked about earlier with respect to the personalization being a
Speaker 3: huge trend. I think brands are catching on that they
Speaker 3: need to have an editorial point of view that is
Speaker 3: different than their competitors in order to survive. Because if
Speaker 3: you're buying leggings and all the athleadsire brands look exactly
Speaker 3: the same, guess what you're going to buy the cheapest
Speaker 3: leggings you can find it, it's a price raise to
Speaker 3: the bottom. So the way that brands survive and thrive
Speaker 3: in this new paradigm of fierce competition, of changing customer journeys,
Speaker 3: of disintermediating sort of web experiences as we know them
Speaker 3: really comes down to elevating that brand in the minds
Speaker 3: of the consumer, and that's really where we're headed. You know,
Speaker 3: the way we shop is dramatically going to change. Siri
Speaker 3: is just going to know you have a web a
Speaker 3: wedding coming up because she's plugged into your calendar on
Speaker 3: your phone. She's going to know what you have in
Speaker 3: your closet because she has all your photos. She's going
Speaker 3: to know what you like and what you buy because
Speaker 3: of your order confirmation emails, and she's just going to
Speaker 3: suggest you stuff to buy.
Speaker 2: I think your web Michelle, we we got to leave
Speaker 2: it there. Thank you so much for joining. I said,
Speaker 2: I Happy holiday season to you. That is Michelle bacherc.
Speaker 2: She is the CEO of A Fine Mine and the
Speaker 2: founder there. Of course,