Lifestyle Commerce Platform Helps Retailers Capitalize on Modern Product Discovery Trends
Curated for You, a rapid-growth, AI-powered lifestyle commerce company, today announced it has received $2.4 million in seed funding to continue the development and delivery of its industry-first lifestyle commerce and consumer insights platform for fashion retailers.
Investors in the seed round include commerce-focused Dundee Venture Capital and AI-centric AIX Ventures.
Google trend reporting has shown that the way products are categorized and tagged (e.g. “blue floral dress”) often does not match the way customers shop (e.g. “East Coast wedding guest dress,” “spring brunch outfit,” or “bridal shower dress”). Lifestyle commerce is a marketing and sales approach where a brand connects itself to the ideals, values, and aspirations of their target audience, thus creating an idea that the use of their product brings that audience closer to its aspirational lifestyle.
The Curated for You platform enables retailers to automate the creation and implementation of trend-, event-, and lifestyle-based product tagging and curation at scale across all marketing channels. This creates new opportunities for retailers to drive revenue, save costs, and improve efficiencies with little intervention needed for implementation. The platform can be deployed in as little as a week.
“In the coming decade, the retailers who embrace lifestyle commerce will win. Ecommerce is no longer a point-in-time transaction – it’s woven into the fabric of our daily lives. Fashion retailers need a way to surface relevant products not only at the bottom of the funnel when a customer has already decided on a look, but the moment a customer buys their festival ticket, starts exploring a new aesthetic, or begins planning for a life event,” Katy Aucoin, Co-Founder & CEO of Curated for You, said.
Curated for You is the only solution designed for lifestyle automation at scale. The platform creates thousands of new lifestyle curations based on the trends, events, and lifestyle factors that are triggering consumer purchases every day.
It does this by leveraging state-of-the-art technology that includes two key innovations:
- A Lifestyle Knowledge Graph that detects and connects relationships between lifestyle concepts and individual consumers.
- Measurement of consumer motivations based on social-scientific measurement theory, leveraging machine vision and natural language processing to accurately predict consumer perceptions at scale and improve the shopping experience.
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“Dundee Venture Capital is focused on supporting commerce brands that will define a new category, and Curated for You is poised to do that with lifestyle commerce. We envision CFY becoming foundational to ecommerce search and product discovery, as the focus moves from product-centric to people-centric experiences. Their vision for enabling ecommerce retailers to capture more sales is innovative and well supported by market trends and needs,” Matt Shandy of Dundee Venture Capital, said.
“As a venture fund dedicated to backing AI-focused entrepreneurs who are building category-leading AI products, we were immediately impressed with Curated for You’s team, domain expertise, and technology. Curated for You’s state-of-the-art approach specializes in measuring consumer motivations based on social-scientific data-annotation techniques paired with machine vision and natural language processing. Their approach allows clients to make shopping better by centering experiences around consumer lifestyles,” Bianca Caban of AIX Ventures said.
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Curated for You will use the financing to expand capabilities and execute hiring for product, development, and sales colleagues. The company recently brought on a seasoned team of strategic advisors from the fashion and technology industries, including Jenny Fleiss (co-founder of Rent the Runway who was one of Fortune’s “40 Under 40” and Fast Company’s “Most Influential Women in Technology”); Divya Mathur (former Chief Merchant at Intermix and Senior Director of Global E-commerce Buying and Site Merchandising at Michael Kors).
