“Our vision has always been to revolutionise the shopping experience through technology.”- Meghna Saraogi and Akhil Tolani, Founders at StyleDotMe.
Shopping and retail is one segment where the impact of Augmented Reality (AR) has been monumental, adding a lot of benefits to the industry. From streamlining the process of making both online and offline shopping easier for people, AR is a different ball game altogether.
AR and VR are radically changing the way people consume experiences. Integration of AR in the retail sector has become a mandatory trend as it enhances customer engagement. The immersive media market in India is expected to grow to USD 6.5 Billion by 2022 while AR is estimated to grow to USD 5.9 Billion and VR to USD 0.5 Billion by 2022.
Gurgaon-based StyleDotMe not only provides customers with a great experience, but it also delivers jewellers with actionable insights to optimise their entire value chain across design, manufacturing, operations, marketing and sales.
Founded by Meghna Saraogi and Akhil Tolani in 2015, StyleDotMe is a fashion tech startup that is revolutionising jewellery shopping experience. The company has raised close to $1 Million from some of the top angel investors in the country.
Meghna stated, “StyleDotMe’s aim has been to disrupt the retail model with our immersive AR technology. We have built a breakthrough technology for an industry that is traditional and insulated against disruptors such as ours.”
Flagship Product
The company’s flagship product is mirrAR, which is an AR tech platform for jewellers. It allows shoppers to try jewellery on digital platforms of client brands without actually having to wear the pieces and get instant fashion advice from experts, bloggers and influencers around the world.
According to the founders, this technology is helping jewellery brands increase their reach and enable easy checkouts by providing shoppers with more product options and the ability to see multiple jewellery pieces on themselves in quick succession.
How Is It Differentiated From Other Products In The Market?
To this question, the founders replied that the company’s innovative AR technology works automatically on digitised versions of jewellery in real-time while other products in the market require users to manually position the jewellery on themselves. Also, mirrAR can be plugged into any platform, whether it’s on a device like an iPad or on the web that allows for both offline and online integration.
Use Of AI And ML At StyleDotMe
According to the founders, using the patent-pending breakthrough in computer vision, they are providing an unprecedented experience in real-time virtual jewellery try-on.
mirrAR conducts face-mapping in real-time, recording the time-spent, identifies skin tone, approximate age, mood, location of the customer to capture the reaction to the displayed design and then recommends various jewellery designs that may appeal to users. This is supplemented by privacy features that ensure that this data is clustered and not tracked on an individual level.
Core Technology Stack
The tech stack of StyleDotMe consists of multiple Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs). This was developed and trained in-house by the firm’s tech team for detecting various parts of a person’s body.
mirrAR runs entirely on the client-side in order to be completely real-time. The flagship product performs face tracking in less than 2 milliseconds to overlay jewellery on a 60 frames/second phone camera. The entire platform runs across all devices including iOS, Android and Web. The machine learning models in this product are powered by TensorFlow, and the cloud platform provider is Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Tackling Hiring Phase
To this question, the Akhil stated, “We continually work towards developing realistic short term and long term hiring forecasts based on the projects we plan to launch in future.” Meghna added, “The qualities that we look for in employees besides the required skill sets are experience, attitude, cultural fit, high ethics and values. These qualities are extremely important to build the right culture for our work environment.”
Future Roadmap
In the next 5 years, the company envisions itself to become the industry leader globally catering to the entire fashion retail industry. Meghna stated, “Through our platform, people across the globe will be able to try-on things virtually and make a purchase. Some of the prominent categories that we will have our dominance in art jewellery, makeup, eyewear, watches and apparel.”
