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Shoppers can take their pick from 30,000 items on British pre-owned luxury resale platform Hardly Ever Worn It (Hewi). But while the search engine helps provide a steer, Hewi’s range represents a daunting challenge.
Some consumers — particularly Gen Z — love the resale hunt. One of their top three incentives for buying secondhand is to have more fun while shopping (alongside cost-saving and sustainability), according to Thredup’s 2022 resale report. They’ll trawl through Depop and the RealReal and spend hours sifting through clothing on Poshmark and Vestiaire Collective to find “the one”.
However, not all shoppers want to dig. For many, it can be fatigue-inducing, particularly for those accustomed to having an in-person sales associate to guide luxury purchases, as Sarah Davis, founder and president of luxury resale site Fashionphile, told Vogue Business Founders’ Forum attendees in January. It’s “death by choice”, says Brandon Holley, chief fashion officer of AI e-commerce platform Shoptrue.
Enter Maia, a new chatbot created by Sociate, an AI startup founded in 2020. Maia learns to ask the right questions to guide customers to the products they want and encourage brand discovery. Launching on Hewi today, Maia’s technology is based on the concept of curious AI and is multimodal, meaning it “sees and speaks” to gain a deeper understanding and produce better output. Unlike ChatGPT, which uses a language model and requires items to be labelled, Sociate’s tech can understand images and context, its founders say. OpenAI’s new ChatGPT-4, announced yesterday, is currently testing image recognition, according to The Guardian.
But, can it get over perhaps the biggest hurdle: earnings consumers’ trust?
Responding to emotions
Three metrics will be used to measure Maia’s success, Sociate says: engagement (keeping people on the website and searching); discoverability (how many products people are looking at); and, ultimately, conversion (making purchases). The goal is to increase engagement by 20 per cent, discoverability by 30 per cent and conversion rates by 10 per cent.
The overarching objective is to make the shopping experience more user friendly. A Hewi customer might type in, I want to dress like Wednesday Adams, and Maia — which has its own digital avatar created by Unus Labs — will pull up a dark-coloured, white-collared range of dresses and outfits. Looking to writer and influencer Camille Charriere’s Instagram for inspiration? Tell Maia her name, and she’ll show you options. Sociate co-founder and CEO Yasmin Topia says she asked Maia for Andy Warhol-inspired clothes. “There was a soup can dress in the [Hewi] inventory,” she recalls gleefully. “There’s no way you would have found that otherwise.”
