Released in The Interline’s AI Report 2024, this executive interview with Bold Metrics is one of a fourteen-part series that sees The Interline quiz executives from companies who have either introduced new AI solutions or added meaningful new AI capabilities into their existing platforms.
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Key Takeaways:
- AI is expected to revolutionise various industries by automating tasks, improving decision-making, and augmenting human capabilities.
- Bold Metrics leverages AI to create digital twins of shoppers, offering personalised sizing recommendations that enhance shopping experiences and reduce fit-related returns.
- The AI technology captures detailed body measurements and purchase behaviours, providing brands with actionable insights to optimise product design and sizing strategies, resulting in measurable ROI.
What’s your working definition of AI? Does it differ from the public understanding, which is currently dominated by large language models and generative text-to-image models? And how does that definition manifest itself in your solution(s)?
Much of the recent popularity in consumer accessible AI applications is based on the context of natural language, text, or image-based prompts. AI also holds the power to analyze vast amounts of multi-dimensional quantitative data to extract information and predictive insights that hold the potential to drive actionable outcomes.
In the context of Bold Metrics, AI manifests itself in our size and fit solutions by accurately creating a shopper’s digital twin – represented with more than 50 body measurements of that shopper – and providing garment-specific size recommendations tailored to that individual’s body shape and fit preferences. Our AI-powered system considers a multitude of factors, including body measurements, garment specifications, and continuous machine learning on purchases, and returns behaviors to deliver personalized sizing guidance that enhances the shopping experience for consumers and drives tangible results for our clients. By harnessing AI’s capabilities toward a practical application in the apparel industry, we’re revolutionizing the way people shop for clothes and helping brands gain access to digital twin body measurement data at scale.
Beyond the technologies themselves, the current AI era has also opened up a wider willingness to challenge long-standing and traditional ways of working in almost every area of fashion. When we consider the tools the industry uses for sizing and fit – both in-house and consumer-facing – there definitely seems to be an opportunity for disruption. How are you deploying generative AI, and in concert with what other technology, to encourage creators and consumers to rethink fit and size?
Historically, size charts have been the traditional approach to assisting consumers with sizing, and while they offer an entry point for fit guidance, they are quite limited in utility as consumers typically do not know their detailed body measurements. Sizing tools that ask about one’s size in other brands, require taking full body photos or using measuring tapes risk detracting from the experience, and present hurdles in the purchase process. Bold Metrics generative AI platform has overcome these limitations to provide a more personalized, accurate, adoptable, and adaptable sizing experience, leading to improved shopper confidence and reduced returns.
We deploy generative AI in a multitude of vectors, first with our digital twin technology – creating a “twin” of each shopper. From just 4-6 simple shopper input prompts, our generative AI technology accurately determines critical points of measure to create unique digital twins of shoppers with over 50 body data measurements. There is no requirement for a measuring tape or taking a full body picture/s of oneself, with our proprietary AI technology generating the digital twin directly from the survey prompts. The technology combines shopper body data with brand-specific garment data, providing tailor-level accurate size recommendations that show how an item will fit across critical points of measure — allowing shoppers to choose their best size based on their personal fit preference. The system continuously learns over time, with a built-in feedback loop system consisting of purchase and returns data associated with the digital twin data. By tracking user journeys and monitoring purchase and return behaviors, the system gathers valuable feedback to enhance future fit simulations. This continuous learning loop enables the technology to adapt and evolve based on practical application data from customers of a specific brand.
Ultimately, the growing dataset of consumer digital twins paired with garment data and purchasing behaviors allows creators to harness body data insights to design based on their actual shopper’s body data instead of the generalized population studies or fit models that the industry typically accesses.
As we have seen throughout this report, another key use case for AI is extracting new insights and new value from both novel and pre-existing datasets. For direct-to-consumer brands and retailers, body and sizing data fits into both those categories: organizations already hold historic and aggregated information, but tools like Bold Metrics are also opening up new data streams and new links between datapoints. How do you see AI changing the data that’s available to brands and retailers, and changing what they are able to do with that information?
Generative AI is bringing entirely new data sets to brands and retailers. Behind the scenes, anytime a consumer engages our solutions and responds to the survey prompts to receive a size recommendation, that consumer’s digital twin body measurement data is being captured and related to their purchase and return behavior. This AI body capture creates the same detail of body shape and measurement data as though their customers had stepped into a highly accurate 3D body scanner, but without the cumbersome scan.
This 3D digital twin data is a game-changer for the apparel industry. Never before have brands and retailers had a practical way to collect this data at scale, short of installing physical scanners in stores (a solution that is neither scalable nor practical) the industry as a whole has been relatively blinded to their customer’s real body measurement data and how it relates to their fit coverage across their demographics. The ability to break down customers’ body measurements by product and purchase/returns can completely change the product design process, allowing for a data-driven quantification of their fits and size gradation systems. This has the power to greatly impact overall return rates with better-fitting products that enter the market in addition to a better capture of the overall market with more apt fits for diverse body shapes and sizes.
There is a drive within both AI and retail, right now, towards personalisation. For AI initiatives this means moving from off-the-shelf models to models that are trained on either a brand’s DNA or a consumer’s knowledge base and preferences. For retail, it means adapting offers, experiences, communications, and channels to meet the consumer. With Bold Metrics you’re trying to tackle both – allowing consumers to shop with personal fit preferences in mind, and giving retailers access to this information, and also deploying AI in service of building an understanding of the extreme subjectivity of fit. How do you see this developing from here?
The convergence of AI and retail towards personalization represents an exciting frontier in the industry, and Bold Metrics is at the forefront of this movement. We’re tackling both aspects by leveraging AI to empower consumers to shop with their personal fit preferences in mind while also providing retailers with valuable insights into customer body data and sizing needs.
Moving forward, we see this development evolving in several key ways:
Deeper Insights for Retailers: By harnessing AI to build a deeper understanding of the subjectivity of fit, we’ll be able to provide retailers with actionable insights into consumer preferences and behavior. This includes identifying trends and patterns in sizing preferences across different demographics and geographies, enabling retailers to optimize their product offerings and strategies accordingly.
The power of preference: Allowing consumers to purchase based on their personal fit preferences will becoming increasingly important as demand for personalized experiences grows. Does the individual want to wear the garment slightly snug, loose, or just right? A retailer can’t answer this question. Our approach allows the shopper to have this information at their fingertips and make a more informed decision.
Data privacy and security: As we deploy AI to collect and analyze increasingly granular data about consumer preferences and behavior, we’ll also need to prioritize data privacy and security. There’s no registration, no storage of sensitive information — no personally identifiable information (PII) data is required by our technology. We prioritize data privacy and security, taking a very strict approach to never store or collect any PII.
Overall, we envision a future where AI-powered personalization transforms the retail experience, enabling consumers to shop with confidence and retailers to better understand and meet the needs of their customers. At Bold Metrics, we’re excited to continue driving innovation in this space and shaping the future of retail with our AI-driven size and fit technology solutions.
For a lot of organisations, the biggest unanswered questions in AI all swirl around return on investment, which is either uncertain or difficult to measure in a lot of use cases. That may not be the case here, though, since fit is at the root of more than 75% of all apparel returns, so if an AI solution can replace the guesswork, averaging, and uncertainty that both retailers and consumers experience then it can potentially have a real and quantifiable bottom-line impact. How is that impact going to be realised?
Fortunately, our ROI is very measurable and realized by our clients. When it comes to fit and sizing, there are three dominant KPIs we measure where our clients experience a direct ROI: Returns decrease, conversions lift and average order value increase.
Being that 75% of all apparel returns are due to fit, and with rises in bracketing behavior due to poor size communication, brands should consider generative AI as a way to combat returns. By providing consumers with accurate sizing recommendations tailored to their individual preferences and body shapes, brands can significantly reduce return rates due to consumer error in purchasing the wrong size or engaging in bracketing behavior. This reduction in returns directly translates to cost savings for retailers, as they incur fewer expenses associated with processing returns and restocking inventory. On average, we drive an 18% reduction in fit-related returns when consumers follow our sizing recommendations.
Accurate and personalized size recommendations give shoppers purchase confidence in addition to enhancing the overall shopping experience. The ease of the Bold Metrics user experience has been proven to aid in the purchase process, as measured by conversion lifts and the propensity of customers to increase their overall order value. On average we drive an average 232% increase in conversion when shoppers engage our solution/s. With that increased purchase confidence, we also measure increased purchase quantities by consumers, with a 32% mean increase in average order value.
The combination of realized impact associated with increase conversion rate, average order value and reduced return rates for shoppers that engage our solutions, brands and retailers can quantify a meaningful ROI that is typically tens of multiples above their investment in the system.
What do you see as the near-term future of AI – both within your solution(s) and in general? Do you believe it will be a transformative class of technologies the way people expect?
The near-term future of AI holds immense promise, both within our platform at Bold Metrics and in general across industries. We believe that AI will continue to be a transformative class of technologies, reshaping the way we work, live, and interact with technology.
Within Bold Metrics, we see AI playing a central role in further enhancing the accuracy and effectiveness of our size and fit technology solutions. This is in addition to actionable insights that can be leveraged throughout a retail organization such as in technical design, merchandizing, targeted marketing, and other optimizations that can be realized on the data that the Bold Metrics AI system generates. We’re continually innovating and leveraging AI to provide even more personalized and seamless shopping experiences for consumers while delivering actionable insights and quantifiable ROI for retailers.
In general, we anticipate AI becoming increasingly integrated into everyday life, driving efficiencies, improving decision-making processes, and unlocking new opportunities across various sectors. From healthcare and finance to transportation and entertainment, AI will revolutionize industries by automating tasks, analyzing data at scale, and augmenting human capabilities.
While there are undoubtedly challenges and ethical considerations to navigate, such as data privacy and algorithmic bias, we believe that the potential benefits of AI far outweigh the risks. By fostering collaboration, innovation, and responsible AI development practices, we can harness the transformative power of AI to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges and create a more inclusive and sustainable future for all.
Overall, we’re optimistic about the near-term future of AI and its potential to drive positive change and innovation, both within Bold Metrics and beyond. As AI continues to evolve and mature, we’re excited to be at the forefront of this technological revolution and to contribute to its transformative impact on society.