First Look: Vestico
The social fit and personalisation platform for Fashion & Beauty.
Company: Vestico
Deck: Here
Raising: $1m with $400k committed.
Leadership Team: Maddie, Benedikt, and Maia
Team, Vision & Value Proposition
What are your backgrounds, and how did you meet? 🏃♀️🏃♂️🏃♀️
Maia, CEO - over five years of product & marketing experience from Fortune 500 companies & startups.
Benedikt, CTO - former founding member of Photos AI team @Apple with over 10 patents in machine learning.
Maddie, CCO - former sales manager at Diageo managing national accounts worth over £20m.
Maddie and Maia met while pursuing an MBA degree at London Business School. They are both Walpole’s Luxury Leaders of Tomorrow.
What is your vision and mission as founders? 🚀
Fashion is the largest eCommerce industry worldwide, with the highest return rates (up to 60%) & lowest conversion (1.7%.) Beauty is close behind. Beyond easy payment & fast checkouts, shopping experiences have remained relatively unchanged for over a decade. Our driver is our knowledge that five years from now, we will fundamentally transform the way people shop online for beauty and fashion.
What is your core value proposition? ✨
We bring content to commerce in an entirely new way by combining UGC with proprietary AI matching technology. Through hyper-personalisation, Vestico gives shoppers the confidence and inspiration to buy more (10x increased conversion) and return less (-17% decrease in returns) while gathering critical data to inform the retailers on the whole value chain from marketing to manufacturing.
Product
What are the key features of your current product? 👨💻
There are multiple, but the ability to hyper-personalise shopper experiences through body and face matching is really important. Out of millions of images and videos, we are able to show any shopper 5-10 pieces of content that is most relevant to their shopping experience.
How has the product evolved since you began work on it? 👩💻
As a team, we are extremely data-driven, so from day one, we knew that we would only continue building out capabilities if we found solutions that truly worked. After testing Vestico on fashion and delivering market leading results in returns reduction, engagement and conversion, we got approached by a massive beauty conglomerate asking us to build a similar solution for beauty. We have, and we are, so excited to share it with the world.
Market
What is driving growth in this market? 📈
The consumer is spending increasing amounts of time in the digital world, and they naturally expect that to extend to shopping. The digital world is offering increasingly engaging, exciting and inspirational experiences to the shopper. Think about TikTok and its growth during the pandemic. The most natural place for people to shop is online, it's what makes sense to them.
It’s no surprise that eCommerce fashion and beauty are here to stay and grow. On a global scale, it is predicted to reach an annual growth rate of 14.2% between 2017-2025 and will amass over £1 trillion in sales by 2025.
What do you believe is the key to winning in this market? 🔑
Finding a way to connect with Gen-Z customers. According to a recent Bloomberg report, young students and professionals now command around $360bn in disposable income, and it’s growing. Around 80% of Gen-Z say that they will only buy from brands they feel represented by, so retailers have to take notice.
Covid-19 has significantly accelerated public demand for purposeful production, so creating value chain processes that are sustainable is no longer a “good to have” it’s a must-have. Chanel issued a £500m sustainability-linked bond last year and vowed to shift to 100% renewable electricity operations by 2025. Equally, 23 enterprise brands and textile companies, including Nike, Adidas, Burton, Burberry and Timberland, pledged to use 100% sustainable cotton by 2025. While these strides are promising, they are far from complete.
What will the market look like in 5-10 years? 🗓️
We will be living in a world where Gen-Z has huge spending power and is driving the industry. The market will be more inclusive, sustainable and data driven. Retailers will be using data to optimise their value chain processes, produce less waste and deeply personalise experiences for their consumers.
Fundraise
What are you looking to raise now, and what milestones are you hoping to achieve with this financing round? 💸
We are raising $1m, with $400,000 committed, and have three major milestones we will hit with the raise.
Hiring and growing the team.
Growing the business and signing on 20 enterprise retailers by 2024.
R&D: we’re looking forward to starting some key research initiatives around image background segmentation for the luxury segment, enterprise analytics and more.