Stylitics Maximizes Retailers’ Catalogs With Automated Styling And Outfitting Solutions

Consumers want to see different ways to wear and style fashion items. Stylitics’ patented AI-powered technology creates visual collages of products based on brands’ own guidelines and in-stock inventory and shoppers’ need for variety.

By automatically delivering millions of outfitting, styling and bundling recommendations across web, email, advertising, in-store and social channels, Stylitics helps apparel, home and beauty companies visually merchandise their products, share their brand vision at scale and create more engaging shopping experiences.

Retailers such as WalmartWMT
, Revolve, Bloomingdale’s, Kohl’s, Chico’s Puma, West Elm and Express, among others, are using Stylitics to move clearance and deep inventory products that may have been over-bought and to drive up sales before discounts apply.

In August, Stylitics drove $176 million in incremental revenue and 1.1 million units across its customer base. In September, Stylitics technology saved about 250,000 hours of merchandising time across its 120-plus customers (retailers), producing over 860,000 original editorial on-brand pieces of visual content.

“There’s a huge profitability component to it,” said Rohan Deuskar, cofounder and CEO. “When we show the customer how to style a product, how to style a room, how to style an outfit, generally when they looking at something they’re on the fence about, they’re more likely to buy that product. They’re more likely to find an accessory they like, so that’s a huge part of the value we drive to help retailers provide that inspiration at scale to shoppers.”

The company recently raised $80 million in series C funding, led by PSG, bringing its total funding to date to more than $100 million. The capital will be used to lean into the personalization and profitability aspects of the technology.

“One of the things we’ve seen for five or six years is the impact we have on last mile digital merchandising,” Deuskar. “If you think about most brands and most retailers, they’ve bought what they’ve bought into. As they head into the fall and holiday season, they can really turn up the advertising dials, if they have the budget for that.

“We are able to literally overnight start boosting those products by styling them with bestsellers,” Deuskar said. “As you see more ads within the retailer’s site, more views of those outfits, we start to see sales of those products go up. We’re really investing a lot of capital into taking that all the way and making sure this hyper -intelligent, real time dashboard enables retailers to clear through inventory and push full price.”

A U.S.-based luxury retailer is using Stylitics content and technology to automatically publish shoppable looks across multiple global regions with one click. The outfits are generated to be relevant for multiple markets and mapped to locally available inventory – so they could provide inspiring local content without needing local studios, models, etc., Deuskar said.

A major department store is using the Stylitics platform to rapidly publish shoppable outfit galleries and “quick hit” landing pages that spotlight categories they want to clear through early, by framing them as seasonal collections and trends – for example, fashion jeans, sweaters, plaid and work from anywhere and athleisure.

The store has 70 of these live on its site. These Stylitics-powered landing pages and outfit galleries take less than five minutes of human time to create and publish versus a typical lead time of six to 10 weeks and dozens of hours of studio, design and marketing time. The speed and flexibility of this gives merchants the ability to fine-tun and take control in-the-moment over what inventory to promote.

“We can move products that you need to move in real time,” Deuskar said. “There are two phases of the company. The first phase was pioneering the digital closet platform for shoppers. We really felt the shoppers would like to see what purchase they had in what place and build outfits for recommendations in an ad-free environment, which we had built out over the years.

“Then, we had a lot of retailers start to look at our technology,” Deuskar said. “They’d tell us, ‘We haven’t been able to solve this problem of scaling our inspiration or providing outfitting to our own shoppers through our ecosystem,’ so we pivoted the business to focus on primarily those use cases.”

In good times, the outfits and bundles drive topline growth and retailers are able to roll out a lot of additional features fast. “In times like we’re heading into, it suddenly becomes something where you can avoid additional operational costs or reduce your costs,” Deuskar said. “It becomes something that’s a critical piece of the digital merchandising system strategies.”

When Covid reared its head in April and May 2020, a lot of retailers’ marketing and merchandising teams were panicking. “All the assets they had, all the studio photography and marketing pieces were inappropriate for a time when everybody’s hunkering down and you don’t want to see images of people hanging out in a bar,” Deuskar said. “Sometimes, we literally overnight created hundreds of thousands of new digital outfits and looks and assets using the inventory people wanted to buy.”

During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, studios were shut down, and “you couldn’t get models in a room together,” Deuskar said. “On a marginal cost basis we were able to create for dozens of our customers, all sorts of work from home or more comfortable, relaxed looks. We’ve had a lot of good will from helping the retailers at a bad time.”