Artificial Intelligence for Online Shopping
Despite the two ladies’ lack of business ownership (‘entrepreneurial’) experience, together they succeeded with expert guidance, in founding a mobile and web product that helps women discover and buy clothes from their favorite brands both online and in stores.
ONE SHOPPER’S EXPERIENCE IMPROVED BY ‘BEHIND THE SCENES’ A.I.
When Danielle S (this is not her career story) went shopping online for something special to wear to her niece’s wedding in 2021, she was looking for “a very specific type of dress based on trends I had seen recently.”
To her delight, Bloomingdales.com came through like a personal shopper. The menu filter for “formal dresses” prompted her to choose from 15 criteria like dress length, color, neckline, sleeve length and embellishments. Moments later, she was sorting through 200 desirable options. “It was quick and really focused,” she said. “I had no problem going from one (online) page to the next, because there were meaningful results for me.” She found “the perfect dress”, bought it and months later, DS – in her role as the chief information officer at J. Crew Group which includes Bloomingdales – was introduced to ‘Lily AI” an artificial intelligence-powered platform that began working with fashion retailers in 2019.
DS did a test run on Bloomingdale’s product catalog from the company’s Madewell brand. Madewell supplied photos and product descriptions for its garments. Lily AI’s artificial intelligence was able to then assign about 13 attributes to each product – from more than 15,000 tags that a team of fashion domain experts (at Lily AI’s predecessor, ‘Lily”) started assigning in 2016, three years before Lily AI had retail clients. By the time of DS’ test, Lily AI had run more than one billion searches, each helping its algorithm to become more sophisticated. So, Lily AI was able to accurately match Bloomingdale’s Madewell merchandise to colloquial terms – “quiet luxury,” “study hall,” “boho chic” – that those online shoppers typed in the search bar, rather than just to stock descriptions of the goods.
In less than a month after Bloomingdales had retained Lily AI to assist Bloomingdales’ sales, Madewell saw a 3 percent increase in purchases from online searches. Lily AI is now used across the entire J. Crew Group and each brand continues to see “meaningful increases” notes DS, who adds, “Lily AI is the real deal.”
LILY AI BACKGROUND
The new, start-up business, ‘Lily AI’ was created by two women. Here follows their respective career stories.
FAMILY BACKGROUND – PG
Purva Gupta (PG for this story), age 35 (as this story is being written) and Sowmiya Chocka Narayanan, (SCN for this story), age 38, both immigrated from India to the United States in their 20s, with the ambition of becoming entrepreneurs (business owners).
PG’s father was an entrepreneur in India, running a family-owned business. He taught PG three things which may seem unorthodox to many American entrepreneurs, but they have served PG well:
- Everything is about sales. We constantly sell, no matter what our path in life. We sell information, ideas, items, ourselves. Become a great salesperson.
- Pursue your passion, body, and soul. People might call you crazy, but that’s ok if you’re giving your “all” to something that stirs your passion.
- Don’t have a “Plan B.” Raise the stakes in what you do so your only option is to succeed.
FAMILY BACKGROUND – SCN
SCN is the daughter of a father who is a civil engineer, now married to another civil engineer.
CHILDHOOD – PG
PG’s future accomplishments and successes weren’t necessarily a ‘given’ – at least not in PG’s own eyes. In high school, she moved from a small town in India to one of India’s most notable, day-boarding schools and with the stress of the adjustment, she lost her confidence. Burdened with a speech stammer, she found it difficult to express herself among her new peers, all very fluent in English.
She soon learned that her confidence levels improved when she dressed well and knew she looked good.
As PG recalls, “I excelled at everything academically because books are all I could turn to. So, I decided to overcome my fear by facing it every day. I forced myself to address large groups of people wherever possible. I was fortunate that my school and teachers helped me tremendously. I would videotape myself to see where I needed improvements and kept pushing myself, striving to be what I deemed was ‘better.’ So, I repeatedly did one thing – dressing to feel my best. Somehow, the power of looking and feeling my best, changed everything.”
When PG looked good, she felt good. Her discovery led her from achievement to achievement, and eventually to a business in which she helps other women find that same confidence.
EDUCATION – PG
In 2009, PG graduated from the top business focused college in India, with a 1% acceptance rate.
In 2013, she began grad school in India. During her Master’s degree program there, she worked with an ‘impact fund’ exploring the world of start-up businesses through the perspective of investors.
In 2014, PG moved to New York City with her husband. She worked with the UNICEF Innovations team while attending the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute. Soon she moved – by herself – to Silicon Valley, California where she saw an opportunity to pursue her dream of becoming an entrepreneur. Although PG considers her move to California and the beginning of a long-distance relationship with her husband “one of the most painful things I’ve ever done, my love and respect for my husband has only grown – he understands that my business – Lily – is my oxygen.”
EDUCATION – SCN
Following her high school graduation, SCN earned her Bachelors degree in technology from a technology focused college in India. Later, after immigrating to the U.S., she earned two Master’s degrees at the University of Texas in Austin: in computer engineering and separately, in arts.
FIRST JOBS ARE NEVER A BINDING CAREER COMMITMENT
FOR PG –
After college graduation, PG landed a prestigious internship at a leading advertising agency in India. An economist by education, PG followed her internship with a position at a company in its early days as a mobile payments and branchless banking startup.
FOR SCN –
Before partnering in business with PG, SCN was a computer software engineer involved with information technology and related services at several U.S. based companies. In the U.S., she worked at Yahoo, then as the senior software engineer in product development at the gaming startup Pocket Gems. Later, she was a senior engineer at the cloud-based content manager Box.
Prior to joining PG to co-found Lily, SCN built a patent pending approach to centrally manage access to secured data and worked closely with companies to deliver the solution on an aggressive timeline which generated 10+M in revenue for Box from strategic partners like GE and World Bank.
SCN describes herself as a ‘technologist’ with the passion to build high impact products in fast paced environments. In her 8+ years of experience, she has worked on “almost every part of the stack and at different stages of startups too. Currently I am leveraging machine learning and Emotion AI to build algorithms that match people to products according to their perceptions.”
RANDOM SHOPPING IDEA LEADS TO A NEW CAREER
After PG, by then an economist by education, moved to the U.S. with her husband, an MBA student, she went searching in New York City stores for “a flowy beach dress with sleeves” and also in online searches, only to find nothing meeting her wishes. She assumed that her Indian heritage language, despite being able to write and speak well in English, might be a barrier, she said, and wondered, “Was this an immigrant problem I was having?”
So, PG shifted into ‘academic research mode’, spending the next 18 months canvassing the school community where her husband was taking courses, doing one-on-one interviews with American women of all ages. She asked each the same thing: “Describe the last item of clothing you bought and why that particular one instead of others that were available.”
The more than 1,000 women she spoke with used, on average, about 20 terms each to describe new dresses, blouses, bags, and shoes they had bought. None of them spoke the way retailers did.
“The retail merchant is advertising ‘midnight French terry active wear’ but in consumer-speak, that’s a ‘navy blue sweatshirt,” concluded PG, who began to sense a business opportunity to bridge the gap “with a technology product that would have to be deeply technical.”
PG’s husband encouraged her to go to Palo Alto, California, to the Founder Institute, an idea-stage business incubator. There, she met SCN, a software engineer who had left India about a decade earlier to pursue a Master’s degree in Texas.
With $100,000 in financial backing from an early-stage venture capital fund for immigrant-founded start-ups, the two women started ‘Lily’ as a shopping app. A.I. technology provided personalized recommendations to shoppers; PG’s consumer research served as the foundation for SCN to build Lily’s proprietary algorithms.
PG suggested the name ‘Lily,’ aiming to evoke a friend and shopping buddy for women. The app won a best start-up award at the South by Southwest conference in 2017, which helped it collect $2 million from seed investors that year.
But it soon became apparent that the trendy phone app wouldn’t be able to be expanded for widespread use, so the business partners shut it down, revising their search-and-shop model for major fashion retailers. Thus, ‘Lily AI’ was born.
Along the way, Lily AI attracted angel investors like the (women’s pro tennis legend) Serena Williams backed venture fund, as well as other such funds, which enabled SCN to hire a team of 40 engineers, many from ‘Fast.AI.’ a nonprofit research group. “They are machine learning scientists who are pushing the boundaries on computer vision,” said SCN.
Concurrently, PG assembled a team of 25 fashion domain experts: former image consultants, stylists, and retail sales associates, some of whom she found through Craigslist. This group kept adjusting product descriptions and search terms, adding an important human element to Lily’s A.I. – powered technology.
The Lily team is a group of passionate fashion lovers: psychologists and technologists, dedicated to creating a personalized shopping experience that will send women out looking great and feeling great, with the confidence to achieve their own big dreams.
Lily creates a personalized shopping experience for women, 95% of whom say that is a missing component in shopping today. By asking women a series of questions and using a complex algorithm and Artificial Intelligence, Lily links patters of responses to suggestions that satisfy both emotional needs and stylish wants.
And Lily is smart! She learns and remembers as she goes, making each transaction better and more personalized than the one before.
One of the fashion stylists involved with the project noted: “You create a recipe with details that improves over time with machine learning.” Added PG, “But we are more than site search. This artificial intelligence was built for all of retail.”
WHAT INSPIRED PG TO COLLABORATE WITH SCN
As PG explains, “I met SCN at the business incubator, ‘Founder Institute.’ She had reached out to me on LinkedIn regarding guidance on another idea she was working on then – but 90% of our follow-up conversation ended being about Lily and the rest is history. I knew I found the perfect business partner when we immediately aligned on the vision and the problem was already keeping her awake in the night.”
PG continued, “SCN is a super strong founder, very comfortable and confident in the path she sets foot on. I realized her strength and determination on day one when I discovered that she had already left her most recent job before she even knew exactly what our startup would be about although she had a 13-month-old son at home. With strong fundamentals, her quality to simplify complex problems has led us to successfully build some of the deepest tech using emotional intelligence and artificial intelligence. Always being on the edge yet marching away with the calmest look on her face, is another place I get my daily dose of inspiration from her.
THE LILY TEAM CONSISTS OF ALL-WOMEN. INTENTIONAL OR NOT?
According to PG, “No, it wasn’t intentional. Just that it was more logical for women to relate to the problem (of women needing to select the best fashion to be the best representatives of themselves). Presently, we are on our way to hire our first male engineers and data scientists and happily so!”
The background of the need for Lily’s service business, according to PG: More than 150 million women in the U.S. are not happy with their appearance and women get 13 negative thoughts about their body everyday so as a team, we are on a mission to change those numbers and solve this problem. Today, our mission is to turn each of the 13 negative thoughts she sees in her reflection every day, to be positive.”
CAREER SATISFACTION
Lily AI staked its claim to early adoption of artificial intelligence long before the recent buzz about AI has reached a fever pitch especially among businesses, educators, and school students.
Though a relatively young business, Lily AI already counts Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, Gap Inc. brands, Abercrombie & Fitch and ThredUp among its customers.
So, looking back briefly, two immigrant women who had not known each other in their native country, each intent on succeeding in the business world, saw an opportunity to meet a need of a vast number of consumers. With guidance from business start-up experts, the women partnered to launch a new business which attracted investors. Though they soon shut it down to create a better version, the revised business soon caught the attention of major retailers, who signed up as clients and are very satisfied with the results of consumers using a product created by the two women entrepreneurs. Imagine that!
_______________________________________________________
These career stories are based on several sources including a news article written by Teri Agins, published by The New York Times on September 11, 2023, plus internet research.
