How This Cofounder Created An Artificial Intelligence Styling Company To Help Consumers Shop – Forbes

Michelle Harrison Bacharach, the cofounder and CEO of FindMine, an AI styling company, has designed a technology, Complete the Look, that creates complete outfits around retailers products. It blends the art of styling with the ease of automation to represent a companys brand(s) at scale and help answer the question how do I wear this? The technology shows shoppers how to wear clothes with accessories. The company uses artificial intelligence to scale out the guidance that the retailer would provide. FindMine serves over 1.5 billion requests for outfits per year across e-commerce and mobile platforms, and AOV (average order value) and conversions by up to 150% with full outfits.

Michelle Bacharach, Cofounder and CEO of FINDMINE, an AI styling company.

I'm picky about user experiences, Bacharach explains. When I was a consumer in my life, shopping, I was always frustrated by the friction that it caused that I was sold a product in isolation. If I buy a scarf, what do I wear with the scarf? What are the shoes and the top and the jacket? Just answer that question for me when I buy the scarf. Why is it so hard? I started asking those questions as a consumer. Then I started looking into why retailers don't do that. It's because they have a bunch of friction on their side. They have to put together the shirt and the shoe and the pant and the bag and the jacket that go with that outfit. So, because it's manual, and they have tens of thousands of products and products come and go so frequently, it's literally impossible to keep up with. It's physically impossible for them to give an answer to every consumerMy hypothesis was that I would spend more money if they sold me all the other pieces and showed me how to use it. I started looking into [the hypothesis], and it turned out to be true; consumers spend more money when they actually understand the whole package.

Bacharach began working for a startup in Silicon Valley after graduating from college. She focused on the user experience analysis and product management, which meant she looked at customer service tickets and the analytical data around how customers were using the products. After the analysis, shed then make fixes and suggestions for new features and prioritizing those with the tech team.

She always knew she wanted to start her own company. Working at the startup provided her the opportunity to understand how all the different sectors of an organization operated. However, she had always been curious about the possibility of acting. She decided to move to Los Angeles to try to become a professional actress. I ended up deciding that the part of acting that I liked the most was auditioning and competing for the job and positioning and marketing myself, she explains. If you talk to any other actors, thats the part they hate the most. I realized that I should go to business school and focus on the entertainment industry because that's the part of it that really resonated with me.

FINDMINE is part of the SAP CX innovation ecosystem and is currently part of the latest SAP.iO ... [+] Foundry startup accelerator in San Francisco.

After graduating from business school, Bacharach entered the corporate world, where she worked on corporate strategy and product management. The company she worked for underwent a culture shift, which made it difficult working there. At that point, she had two options. She could either find another position with a different company or start her own business venture. I didn't really know what that thing was going to be, Bacharach expresses. I used that as kind of a forcing function to sit down with my list of ideas and decide, what the heck am I going to work on. I thought about it as a time off, like a six-month sabbatical to try to figure out what we're doing. Then I'm going to get invested in from my idea, and then I'm going to be back on the salary wagon and be able to make a living again. I thought it's all going to be so easy. That's what started the journey of me becoming an entrepreneur. It took two-and-a-half years before she earned a livable salary.

I worked for a startup, she states. I watched other people do it. I was a consultant to start off. I worked in corporate America. So, I saw the other side of the coin in the way that that world functions. I didn't want to do this for the long term. I like the early stages of stuff. In retrospect, I guess I did prepare myself, but I didn't know it while I was going through it. I just jumped in.

As Bacharach continues to expand FindMine with the ever-updating artificial intelligence technology, she focuses on the following essential steps to help her with each pivot:

Michelle Bacharach, Cofounder and CEO of FINDMINE, sat down with John Furrier at the Intel AI Lounge ... [+] at South by Southwest 2017 in Austin, Texas.

Don't worry about getting 100% right, Bacharach concludes. Dont look at people who are successful and say, oh, wow. They're so different from me. I can never do that. Look at them and say they're exactly the same as me. They're just two or three years ahead in terms of their learnings and findings. I have to do that same thing, but for whatever I want to start.

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How This Cofounder Created An Artificial Intelligence Styling Company To Help Consumers Shop - Forbes