Q&A with a founder using AI to build your wardrobe

Lisa Yamner is passionate about fashion. After holding senior roles on luxury teams at both Google and Condé Nast, she moved to personalized shopping brand The Yes, which was later acquired by Pinterest. Today she is co-founder and chief brands officer at Daydream, a chat-based AI platform built specifically for fashion.

Yamner and her team have tactfully approached partnerships, data, and UX to build what she thinks could become the ultimate styling tool. Revenue Brew sat down with the founder to talk through the company’s growth so far, and what the future could hold.

It seems like AI is actually dialing in on human tendencies through your product. How does it achieve this?

A lot of search engines are ads based. It’s really about a pay-to-play model; who’s paying to be up there? It’s the same for everyone. With putting the customer at the center, everyone is presented with a different store. Everyone who goes to Daydream, once you personalize it, which you can use it in a nonpersonalized mode, but once it’s personalized, then it’s about you, and then it’s specific to your needs.

One of the aspects about shopping that has been hard to translate to an online setting is the experiential element. How does Daydream approach that problem?

Online shopping has solved for buying, but it is not solved for shopping. Like Amazon, one-click buy, Apple Pay, Google Pay…Buying is easy. You click one button, it shows a bigger house. Shopping has not been solved for. There is very little ceremony and very little experience in that.

Instead of trying to replicate in store, let’s figure out what online can be good that in store can’t be. So how about the fact that in store, you have to limit inventory. You can only hold a certain amount of inventory in a store. Online you can have everything.

How does Daydream use data to build an effective algorithm?

The beauty of what we’re building is that there is a finite set of products and data and interests in terms of what we’re doing. This is fashion. This is not the entire world of everything anybody is going to search for. We use a lot of our search query data to understand what people are searching for, how are they searching for it, what are they looking for, then making sure we’re delivering the right responses.

How has your team approached partnerships as a growth lever in these early stages?

If we were to show up and just be like, “Hey, we’ve got this cool new AI shopping tool,” the brands are sort of like, “Get in line—so does everybody else.”

We essentially have two customers: the shopper and the partners. By the business model we created, we solve both sides’ problems. It’s not an easy problem to solve, but we’re able to do that because of the way the business model is constructed.

How do you make sure each of the brands on the platform is able to reap the rewards?

Once we start driving traffic and customers, it’ll just sort of all come into them. In the meantime, we are providing as much data as we can, so everything that we’re collecting about the customer, we’re sharing back in order to be helpful.

When you think about a successful future, what is going right?

Our North Star is that we’re building this personal shopper in your pocket, and it’s with you anywhere. It doesn’t have to just be in your pocket, it can be on your laptop. It can be on your phone. Ultimately, it could even accompany you in store. So we could help push in-store purchases as well. We could help with all of it; we want to be your first stop for fashion shopping and ultimately your last stop.