New App Uses Pictures To Generate Clothes Recommendations

As of Wednesday (July 15), fashionistas in the U.S. and Canada have one more tool to improve their online shopping experience, reported TechCrunch.

Craves is a new app that allows users to take a picture of the clothes they like, upload it and promptly receive similar items that they can purchase online. The pictures can be taken directly from the app or uploaded from the phone’s camera.

Cofounder Scott Cormier, who was previously the mobile product manager and designer at Wave Accounting in Toronto, said that it was his wife, Nadine, who inspired the idea for the app. “She’d routinely snap photos or save screenshots of outfits she wanted to track down later,” Cormier said. “She’d save them all to an album on her phone and then try to track them down via Google, Pinterest, etc. whenever she’d have a spare moment.”

Cormier thought that technology could make his wife’s life — and many other shoppers’ lives — a lot easier, if all they had to do was take a picture of the clothes they liked and wait for the results to show up. “We feel that searching for products with photos and screenshots is drastically easier than trying to find the right keyword combination to plug into Google,” he explained.

Craves also aims at solving one of the issues that Pinterest users have been experiencing while looking for new products: If the pinned images are old, their links may lead to out-of-stock items, unknown retailers or not work altogether. Through Craves, consumers can connect with a wide range of department stores and boutiques that offer products currently available for purchase. The list of retailers includes Coach, French Connection, Luisaviaroma, Mango, Nasty Gal, Ralph Lauren, Saks Fifth Avenue, and many others.

“Our vision with Craves is to make fashion-related images instantly shoppable, and I believe we’ve succeeded in that.” said Cormier in a press release. “Although we realize there are other fashion discovery apps in the market, we feel that the discovery and impulse purchase experience using Craves has been made so seamless that it’s an immensely intuitive and satisfying experience for users.”

The app also offers a social component that allows users to discover new trending items, receive sale notifications, mark results as favorites and follow friends and people whose fashion style they admire.

Craves is a subsidiary of visual search provider Slyce, along with two other consumer apps, Pounce and SnipSnap. Cormier turned to Slyce founders Cameron Chell and Erika Racicot because of their progress in the field of visual search, and they agreed to create a prototype of Craves.

The app took less than a year to develop and has recently undergone four months of private testing with approximately 200 people so that the Craves team could improve the app’s service.

At the moment, the company is focusing on further personalizing the shoppers’ experience, as well as making the checkout process available directly from the Craves app, instead of redirecting consumers to retailers’ mobile sites.

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