Meet The Founder Who Uses AI To Help Retail Brands 'Elevate' What They Do

hi everybody I'm Britney Lewis with Forbes joining me now is Michelle backrack founder and CEO of find mine Michelle thanks so much for joining me thanks for having me Britney of course and before we dive into the conversation can you explain what find mine is yeah so I think like most Founders I started a company to solve my own problem um which is that I'm not the most stylish person I don't have an eye for interior design I don't know how to do a smokey eye and I found that when I would walk by a window display in a retail store I would be like whoa yes this all of it that's my aspirational life right and I feel like a lot of consumers have that struggle so I started asking Brands and retailers like why don't you just do that for every product you sell and what I found is that you know there's just not enough resources in the world to do a window display for every single thing that most retailers and Brands sell so they get about 5% or 10% of the product catalog into those inspirational moments and then consumers like you and me are sort of left without that for everything else so what fine M does is we apply artificial intelligence to deeply understand sort of the Brand's Creative Vision so we can do that inspiration for every single product in the catalog and the consumer gets more of that more of the time I want to read some numbers wwd reported that find mine raised nearly $9 million in series a funding bringing the total race to 17.6 million so first a big congratulations but second the company was founded in 2014 this was a few years before the generative AI boom of late 2022 too so how did you get investors on board so early great question and I think that like this fund this fundraising round that we just did was like the easiest I've ever experienced partly because I've been beating the drum for AI for 10 years and a lot of times people would be like cool but like what's the market for this or cool but I don't really understand it and so now the fact that we are here in this moment and the Market's fully develop for it people are like leaning in to Ai and the fact that we kind of grew up on this old school if you will style of of discriminative AI which is really about like taking the data in to understand what it means and then Blended that with a generative side which is really about producing something that is typically done by a human is really how we crack the nut on getting that right blend of AI to really deliver high quality results for what we do that's really interesting that you saw this coming a decade ago but did you expect to see AI where we are now then I think that I I mean it's obviously changing every single day um and I have this reputation in my own company of being like AI skeptic because I keep having the worst possible user experience every time I ask chat PT to answer something for me so this is running joke I'll screenshot and send it to everyone so I'm constantly being surprised by what AI can and can't do in this moment and I think that um you know if you Circle back to 10 years ago and I forecasted what the future might look like I think there was maybe one or two things that I saw that actually came to fruition and then everything else has just surprised me and will continue to do so just given the pace of change in ai ai has touched really every industry from education obviously now fashion how has it impacted retail overall great question so for our customers who are predict U predominantly like Fortune 500 um Brands they might be internet retailer top 500 type customers so they're they're big companies they have lots of scale what we're doing for them is we're getting $89 million in mental Revenue because we're inspiring their customer the consumer more frequently which is causing brand loyalty to go up so we're actually seeing that customer come back and buy again more frequently they're coming back for um one of our top 500 internet retailer companies 8% more frequently so that repeat purchase effect is building a more loyal customer and the impact of that really can't be understated in a in a industry where people are sort of like you buy once from that brand and then never again so the financial impact is very real but then also the sort of um just what you can do with AI when you don't have limitations of hours in the day or people getting tired or all that all that stuff just unlocks this whole world of possibility and in retail in particular there's so much data think about how many products how many customers how many data points products go in and out of stock Everything Changes that's a blessing and a curse when you talk about AI find mine is fashion focused and when you're talking about hey maybe I wasn't the most fashionable person and when you said that at the beginning that really resonated with me I don't know how to do a smokey eye either I don't have an eye to put everything together so the product resonates with a lot of women AI as we know is a very Mal dominated field so how did you get investors to come onto this and was it harder especially as a woman going into a male dominated field great question I definitely feel like I had the push and pull because fashion is female dominated and we do you know Beauty and home and those tend to be spaces where there's just more women maybe not at the leadership levels as much as they should be um but then we have also the AI side and our AI technology is very very deep and very very robust so I kind of had to play both sides of it um and I think one thing that really helped me get investors excited in this round in particular is the length of History we have because there's so many companies coming in that are you know find mind's AI first and use case specific and I think that's a big differentiator there's so many companies coming in trying to solve something in retail trying to solve styling and then bolting on AI on top of it it's just not differentiated and so if you're an investor putting money in it's like well anyone has access to these Technologies how do I know you're going to be the one to succeed the fact that we have proprietary and very deep data sets on on what we do I think just put us kind of to the top of the list and helped overcome some of that you know there's just less people look like looking like me in this field let's talk about that a little more because as we know AI has disrupted industry after industry over the last year year and a half so how does find mine differentiate itself in this field aside from the longevity great question so um the first thing is that there's kind of these two camps within Ai discriminative and generative that I mentioned before so the the discriminative stuff is sort of more old school and then the generative is like kind of the new shiny object and we believe that you need both in order to succeed in this particular Pursuit which is is styling the reason for that is if you think about generative Ai and the big players in the space Google Amazon U meta ET you can ask it hey make me a style guide make me a lookbook right and maybe you're abber cromy and if you ask it that it might give you something that looks like American Eagle that's a really scary place for Brands to be because they want to differentiate from each other they don't want to look the same and so this generative AI that is trained on sort of the wisdom of the crowds collapses the differentiation between those Brands and that's exactly what fine mine solves to solve that we have to use that discriminative side of things to deeply understand brand we actually map brand in multi-dimensional space which is a crazy thing to kind of picture but being able to articulate what is brand to an AI using computer speak using vectorization is the way we're actually able to then tell generative AI make me a lookbook that looks like Brand X and have it actually look precisely like Brand X can you dive a little deeper in there how are you distinguishing brand to Brand because when you think of abber cromi and American Eagle they have similar looks so how are you breaking those down yeah so as a consumer from the outside and we don't work with either of those I'm just using them as examples here like you can see that they're similar in some ways and you maybe get a sense of how they might be different but maybe not and that's kind of where you stop thinking about it right because you're a consumer you just kind of move on with your day if you work for either one of those Brands if you're the creative director of either of those Brands they can rattle off a whole bunch of ways that they're different but they are also don't have the vocabulary to describe in like human language exactly what is specific and unique about each of those so if they were to crack open open AI or you know um stability or any of these kind of llm Technologies and like try to teach it what their brand is about what ends up happening is all the promise of Time Savings that generative AI is is here to to tout you end up losing because you have to torture yourself into a pretzel to try to explain to it what is it about your brand and that's really the thing that fine mind has become uniquely good at is to very quickly get a sense of what it is to mean what what does this brand mean basically and then feed it into all these different models for the different outputs that look high enough quality meta as I'm sure you know is coming out with smart Ray bands that provide outfit inspiration so how does find mind differentiate itself from those types of products yeah so first of all we're not competing with meta that's sort of the wisdom of the crowd's like styling response which has its place in time where I'm getting dressed I just want to know like quick fit check is this okay am I going to get you know laughed at with in the mom's you know group that I go to if I wear this right there's a very specific purpose for that and then there's also like the leadership and expertise of an individual brand which builds that loyalty and helps you be a better version of yourself and so I see potentially when um Brands start kind of flooding into that space trying to say okay meta like suggest my brand suggest my brand there's like a bidding environment or retail Media or advertising ecosystem built around that recommendation that you get in in that lens that's where fine M can come in because we can say all right well don't just like push this P this specific product for any old reason push what's important to the brand and style it in a way that is authentic to the creative direction of that brand so you're getting the Brand's point of view not just the wisdom of the crowd's point of view speaking of Paradigm shifts we have seen a shift in the way people shop with the rise of social media particularly Tik Tok I know some of your clients include Lululemon and Vineyard Vines they both have a large Tik Tok presence are they nervous apprehensive about a potential Tik Tok ban I think a Tik Tok ban is a blessing and a curse when you think about what brands are going to feel about it on the one hand obviously there's tons of traffic and sources of revenue that come from that channel but on the other hand there's also a leak from the brand sort of core properties to a place like Tik Tok because we talked about it earlier the scale issue of trying to inspire your customers for every single product when if I you know go to buy this Blazer and I don't see it styled in a lookbook or I don't know all the different outfits to wear with it guess where I'm going to go I'm going to go to Tik Tok or Instagram or one of these places and just put in like you know thick Blazer thick white Blazer and just see what kind of inspiration I get and that's really an opportunity for the brand to reclaim that expertise in that moment and then sell the customer the jeans and the shoes and everything that goes with it so that's kind of the the blessing side of it and then I think all the brands that we work with they're all kind of thinking about user generated content they're all thinking about influencers and how they can capitalize on the kinds of consumers who don't necessarily want the brand to tell them exactly what to do because I think all of us as consumers we want expertise from the brand sometimes we want it from our friends sometimes we want it from influencers sometimes we want it from non-celebrity people who are just you know like us sometimes and so you kind of have to cover all of those different um bases to give the customer everything that they need so I think it's I think it's going to be both a blessing and a curse if Tik Tok does get a ban I know you were you have been embracing AI for a decade but do you think if a company is not embracing AI overall they're being left behind in this space right now I think it's still early days I think there's plenty of time to get your feet wet um I liken this to sort of the beginning of the internet or the beginning of like using computers for stuff right now if you say like we use computers to like do banking it's like well duh like you and everybody else right that's how it will be to say um we use AI to do X in the future maybe three years maybe 5 years maybe 10 years we don't know how long but it's coming it's just such early days now that if you don't like I hate to see companies being like what's our AI strategy we need to figure out how to bring AI in that's the wrong way to approach it it's what are our problems what is the strategy we're trying to solve for our business for our industry for our customer and if AI can support you in getting to that goal that's a great application for AI but AI for ai's sake tends to always be a Fool's errand of a lot of money and a lot of waste of time and a lot of frustration do you think AI in your case promotes brand loyalty yeah absolutely I mean one of the things that I started the company based upon is when I had a really great interaction with a store associate or a beauty counter expert or someone who really oozed the brand um expertise I just found myself going back to that more often I can feel that part of my brain almost like clicking into gear like this this is one I trust versus when you're you know when you buy a product and you don't wear it right away or it doesn't quite ever fit into your living room and you're just like every time you look at that chair you're like I just don't know you know you question yourself you doubt yourself you certainly doubt the brand so if you can make the customer feel confident with their purchases and feel like they're living their best life it 100% does Drive brand loyalty and we see that in the data and what do you say to people who are more bearish on AI who think the first thought that comes to mind when they think of AI is hey is this going to take over my job is this going to take over the world what do you say to them I think that's a fair concern and I absolutely believe that the guard rails need to be in place for things like like rights issues you know the SAG after strike was really all about that um training on people's creative pursuit to then disintermediate them from the process I don't believe that that's you know I I believe that people are right to be concerned about that in fine M's particular case we we have to have the seed from the people the people are necessary but not sufficient they have to create that beautiful window display and those like what is the season all about but they only do it again remember for five or 10% of the product catalog no one has the time and resources when you're you know a multi-million dollar a billion dollar brand to create beautiful editorial moments for every single product you sell and then go back and update them when this product went out of stock and this one's come in and now there's a new trend they're just the people to do that don't exist today so there's no jobs to disintermediate and then what we do is we cast the people who are doing that work for that 5 to 10% In This Very elevated light like they're they are the creative directors they are the the Anna wior behind the whole operation and then we're just executing it we're just taking that baton and running with that so you're saying essentially we're not stealing anyone's jobs we're making your life easier making their life easier and almost elevating what they do um one of our investors is this woman who is she's just been in retail and and SE suite and kind of senior VP roles her whole career and the way she described it was you give me time back to do the part of my job that I love which is the deeply creative work it's really fun to create one outfit it's really fun to design a furniture set but it's really boring and tedious to do the 15,000th one right you max out super fast so like let's let them do what they do which is creative and fun and then we just replicate it at scale and everybody wins can you talk about who are your investors what do they look like what are their backgrounds yeah great question we have a whole kind of running the gamut um of investors and so who led our series a was a company called greyhawk Capital um the partner is this guy Brian Smith who is just a very pedigreed kind of Silicon Valley investor SAS software not necessarily retail not necessarily AI he's a generalist assass investor and just very disciplined in what he does and he saw two things he saw kind of the market opportunity for AI and then the just the roster of customers we have paying us real money to do to solve a real problem um and so that's kind of one Camp of investors it's like the Silicon Valley VC type but then we have Angels like the one I mentioned before her name is Sarah Wallace she's the COO at minted which is a home design and and um Furnishings Marketplace and she came from Gap and then she came from Walmart prior to that so the retail folks I think really get it and then the AI folks as well we have uh some investors who are just you know they've been doing this for more than a decade they've been doing this for 20 30 years and really have seen the opportunity that AI has opened up for a really big Financial return in the application that we've chosen so you along with some of your investors have years and years of experience in in AI what do you think's missing from the national conversation then when it comes to AI because there is this debate of a this is really helpful this will move our society at break next speed this is a paradigm shift there's the other debate of people more scared is this going to steal my job like we talked about earlier it's such a good conversation to have for any paradigm shift I mean we had to have it around computers we had to have it around the internet we had to have it around social media there's so many good things that social media have done for Humanity and there's so many dirty bad awful things that it has done and you can't paint it all with the same brush so I think it takes a very um disciplined and time intensive approach to have these conversations that a lot of times I think that people who are involved in the conversation aren't um willing to take the time to have that right I'm talking about in Congress I'm talking about kind of you know like Think Tank groups and stuff that talk about AI we're missing a lot of what we should be thinking about and we're spending too much time talking about the things we shouldn't spend to much time talking about It's Tricky Michelle I appreciate the conversation thank you so much and congratulations thanks again

Channel: Forbes

Views: 3,864

Keywords: Forbes, Forbes Media, Forbes Magazine, Forbes Digital, Business, Finance, Entrepreneurship, Technology, Investing, Personal Finance, AI, Michelle Bacharach, FindMine, retail, branding, female branding companies

Id: YLXXfwwQze0

Length: 17min 48sec (1068 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2024