SAN FRANCISCO — Never underestimate the power of music. Eison Triple Thread certainly isn’t, with an interesting approach to personalization using Spotify playlists.
The online made-to-measure men’s wear company’s new app, launching Monday, will combine answers from a style quiz, Spotify playlists, artificial intelligence and machine learning to come up with garment options for clients.
“Over the past several months, we’ve been focused on the product piece and getting it right and finding that balance of product efficacy and making sure it fits,” said Eison Triple Thread founder and ceo Julian Eison. “We were delivering things that people actually wanted outside of ‘Hey, it looks good. It fits’ and start thinking about application and utility.”
The company began boosting it data-collection capabilities, automating off-line processes in a bid to find where the drop-off, or the decision to not move forward with a purchase, was happening online.
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The app, dubbed Eison Triple Thread Fits, uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to match swatches and fits, while using music as the primary mode of drawing clients in.
“We’re telling them what their optimal wardrobe should be based on the music as the onboarding process,” Eison said. “From there, we make general assumptions on patterns, colors and other things that would fit into their wardrobe and then we serve that to them. This takes it a step further with the personalization. We’re taking music and we’re drawing an inference based on that data and then making a recommendation, finishing the last mile.”
Even for those who may not have a Spotify account, the company has created a style quiz as part of the process.
The company, which launched in 2014, raised an undisclosed initial seed round in two parts, the most recent of which closed last June. Eison said the company, which has a staff of five full-time employees, aims to go out for another round in the fall with that capital to be plugged into the hiring of more experts in data science, such as a chief data scientist, as well as designers. A stronger design team will serve the company well as it looks to build out a more casual offering of denim, sweatsuits and other pieces to balance out the custom suiting and other, more dressy attire Eison Triple Thread initially launched with.
Once that product gets built out, the company will experiment with droplike releases with limited-run pieces perhaps done in collaboration with other brands.
How to use technology in a smart way is the constant Eison continually thinks about and something he said the entire industry should think about the more the term personalization is used.
“I think with this explosion of subscription and membership-based retail, it’s important that people start to really judge these platforms and look at the people who are looking at the recommendations because you start to see all these algorithms and all these buzzwords of what to think and do. We really need to look and think about the teams generating these algorithms. That’s one of the things we want to highlight is we’re using data around people and the most distilled element of the retail process: the cloth of the product. If brands really were part of a lifestyle and they really were promoting the products that they said they would, there would be this reduced churn and stronger customer base. That’s what we’re trying to go after — what people want.”