Marcus Richards
Aistetic is an Oxford University spin-out, delivering 3D body measurement software for online clothing retailers, fitness and digital healthcare providers.
We embrace body diversity and want to encourage brands to become more size-inclusive, whilst making 3D body modelling accessible to anyone, anywhere with a mobile device.
Tell us about yourself?
I’ve worked for L’Oreal, Unilever and PepsiCo coming up with new product ideas and consumer solutions. I built a £18m net revenue business in a year whilst at PepsiCo and my last role was Head of E-commerce for a European business unit.
I got into this because I love innovating – I get a kick out of innovation, building and scaling businesses.
I founded Aistetic with Phil Torr as I experienced the problem of poor fitting clothes personally and we both felt that we could solve this with a technology solution using Phil’s research and expertise in computer vision and deep learning.
With the development of our patent-pending solution, we quickly realised that our purpose is bigger than that – we want to make next-gen 3D body modelling available to anyone with a mobile device.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Keep it simple. We are always working on keeping everything we do as simple as possible focused on high value, impact initiatives. Simplicity enables us to do that – to shed the complexity and additional things that slow you down. This applies to strategic decisions as well as execution details.
What problem does your business solve?
Our focus is first to apply our solution to the online clothes market. The problem is too many clothes do not fit from online orders. As a result, clothes are returned.
This has a financial cost for retailers as they have to process the return, re-stock and re-deliver.
There is an environmental cost with clothes going to landfills, or additional logistics required to handle these returns. It’s a pain for shoppers: ordering multiple sizes, having these to send back or to make a special trip to a store.
We’re addressing this problem with a software solution for retailers that is simple & convenient for the shopper. We want to be your tailor, wherever you are.
We are building an immersive e-commerce shopping experience from your smartphone, where from a simple upload of images we are able to create a highly accurate photo-real 3D body model and take your measurements digitally.
This enables a high level of measurement accuracy and sizing recommendations for a better fit in order to reduce returns, an interactive body model for a virtual “try-on” to increase conversion as well as valuable data for retailers to optimize new product development.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
I was fortunate to live in Italy a few years ago. I could never find clothes that would fit me – I was introduced to a tailor and it was a different thing.
That got me thinking what if everyone could be measured virtually? What if you could buy clothes online and know your measurements and sizes so that you knew it would fit you when you tried it on at home?
We founded Aistetic with the purpose to make next-gen body modelling available to anyone with a mobile device.
Our solution is a B2B SaaS service that enables users in retail, fitness and healthcare to access their accurate 3D body measurements and eventually an accurate photorealistic avatar from their mobile device.
What is your magic sauce?
Our main advantage is accuracy and speed.. We use AI algorithms and deep learning to deliver world-leading 98% accurate body metrics – from head to toe within just 45 seconds. Accuracy is our key focus, and we run regular accuracy evaluations to make sure we walk the talk.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Our ambition is to be the leading 3D body modelling platform from mobile devices. With emerging technologies and the relentlessly approaching Metaverse, we want to stay ahead of the curve.
Within the next 5 years, we want our solution integrated and used on across platforms in retail, fitness, healthcare and the metaverse.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Data collection is a challenge. To maintain a high level of accuracy, we need to train our AI and machine learning regularly.
The more scans we get – the better our AI measures. Until now, we have been developing and iterating our product solution in stealth. We are excited as we are about to go live with customers.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We’d like more people to know about our solution and its value both for businesses and consumers. So we invite those that share our values, and mission and are interested in state-of-the-art tech to follow us on social media
– Ln (https://www.linkedin.com/company/aistetic)
– Twitter (https://twitter.com/aistetic3d)
– Fb (https://www.facebook.com/aistetic3D)
And we also encourage fashion brands and retailers to reach out to us via email – at [email protected].
We are open to collaboration possibilities. Let’s work together to make the benefits of 3D body modelling available to everyone!
