In this series, PAN Communications invites you to get to know the 2018 Cohort of the New York Fashion Tech Lab (NYFT Lab). Helmed out of the global fashion capital – New York City – for the last five years, the NYFT Lab has been at the forefront of retail and fashion technology innovation and integration. As part of PAN New York’s engagement with NYFT Lab, we’re bringing you a sneak peek at the amazing women and their killer tech that’s being tested among some of the world’s leading brands and retail companies.

This week, we sat down with Caitlin Crawford of Fashwell and Nicole Mossman of EverThread to talk about the ins and outs of visual search today. You may remember that back in January, NRF was highlighting the importance of visual technologies for retailers at its annual Big Show in New York City at the Javits Center. We watched that trend come to fruition as these two companies were selected by the New York Fashion Tech Lab’s 2018 Fashion Retail Partners to be taken for a test drive.

Caitlin Crawford, Head of Business Development at Fashwell

Fashwell is harnessing Computer Vision technology where the company’s slick Visual Search platform lets shoppers search for products without having to use words. It’s like placing an image into the search bar and getting from inspiration to checkout in a matter of seconds – an experience that’s valuable for both buyer and seller. Fashwell also automatically annotates your product images with accurate, fine-grain labels at scale. It’s the perfect tool for back-end catalog management and for creating highly personalized shopping experiences. And the value of both offerings is paying off as more and more retailers realize the exponential growth in user engagement month-over-month, according to Caitlin – nearly 25%. With a current stable of customers including Zalando, Nelly.com and Olapic, we guarantee you’ll be hearing more about Fashwell as visual search comes into its own.

Nicole Mossman, Founder and CEO at EverThread

Going from visualization to customization, Nicole and her EverThread team are setting out to put extreme personalization tools into the hands of consumers and designers on any eCommerce site. The result produces an incredible 11x increase in transaction volume and lift when you can show the final purchase visually, according to Nicole. When you think about the evolution of online shopping, a landing page presented you with one product, with a series of bespoke offerings presented below it. Maybe the retailer leveraged data to ensure those bespoke items were ones you were interested in, and maybe it didn’t. However, today’s more sophisticated online shoppers want to see a more “finished look” in the products they expect to purchase online. EverThread is helping retailers provide a method by which an entire “scene” can be shoppable, customizable and effectively help to ensure customer satisfaction. By integrating directly into an eRetailer’s site and brand experience, any consumer or designer can tweak/update/perfect their preferred look, leaving little to the imagination when the package arrives on their doorstep.

Stay tuned for our recap of the 2018 Demo Day to be held on June 7, 2018, at Meredith Corporation in New York City where the Cohort will share more information about the value their companies provide to the industry. We ourselves can’t wait to share more about the key impacts of visualization technology on the retail and fashion industries.