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