Innovative technology bridges e-commerce and in-store design expertise for enhanced customer experience
West
Elm, a purpose-driven furnishings retail brand, has introduced the West
Elm Pinterest Style Finder, a new online tool utilizing artificial
intelligence to help customers transition style inspiration into
products they can buy at West Elm stores and online. The new tool is an
extension of Style
+ Service, the brand’s design consultation program offering
customers design, installation and registry services at each of its 100
stores across the U.S., Australia, Canada and the U.K. West Elm is one
of the first home brands to utilize image recognition technology to
analyze Pinterest Boards to determine a user’s personal style at home.
“This is yet another example of our e-commerce expertise driving
innovative change for our customers,” said Luke Chatelain, Vice
President of Innovation at West Elm. “Our free design consultations
often start with customers sharing their Pinterest board to best
illustrate their vision in terms of colors and style. Pinterest boards
are an efficient tool to quickly get us on the same page, and understand
what inspires our customers visually.”
“Our goal was to automate the process and provide our customers with a
seamless experience when seeking design guidance, as well as to
streamline the process of searching for home products that best express
their personal style,” Chatelain continued. “It’s a great resource for
us to take direct input from our customers and be able to deliver the
personalized products and styles our customers are most interested in.”
The West Elm Pinterest Style Finder is powered by Clarifai’s
image and video recognition AI Technology. Clarifai is a market leader
in visual recognition, and its powerful image and video recognition
technology is built on the most advanced machine learning systems.
“Our objective for retail and e-commerce is to empower every brand with
robust AI tools to enhance their product with innovative offerings,”
said Matt Zeiler, founder and CEO of Clarifai. “The West Elm Style
Finder is not a typical recommendation engine, as it does not rely on a
user’s buying or browsing history. In order to take into account that
personal style can change over time, the tool recognizes some
categorization of a customer’s preference and can start learning a style
from a single photograph. It can develop a real sense of a customer’s
style in a matter of seconds.”
The Style Finder tool utilizes images from a Pinterest board, either a
user’s own board or someone else’s, to recognize a user’s style and
color preferences from the collected array of images. The style finder
then filters products from West Elm’s online catalog of nearly 5,000
products, suggesting three options from each product category, including
furniture, rugs, curtains, mirrors, decorative accessories and more,
that are surfaced in order to offer customers choice and variety.
The West Elm Pinterest Style Finder is unique to West Elm, and is
representative of how West Elm and the Williams-Sonoma, Inc. portfolio
of brands are experimenting with new technology to enhance our
customer’s experience across all channels.
To get started, visit the West Elm Pinterest Style Finder page https://pinterest-style-finder.westelm.com/
to upload photos from your Pinterest board.
About West Elm
Headquartered in Brooklyn, NY since 2002, West Elm opened its first
store in DUMBO, the neighborhood it still proudly calls home. With a
mission of harnessing the power of design and human connection to enrich
lives, everything West Elm does is designed to make an impact in
everyday life, from creating unique, affordable designs for modern
living and commitment to Fair Trade Certified, from LOCAL and
handcrafted products to community-driven collaborations and events. The
brand operates 100 retail stores in the United States, Australia, Canada
and the UK, ships internationally to customers around the world and
operates stores in Mexico, the Middle East and Philippines through
unaffiliated franchisees. In addition to home furnishings retail, West
Elm operates West
Elm Workspace in the commercial furnishings industry and announced
its expansion into the travel and hospitality industry with the launch
of West
Elm Hotels. West
Elm publishes the blog Front+Main
and is part of an active community on Facebook,
Instagram,
Pinterest,
Twitter
and YouTube.
West Elm is a member of the Williams-Sonoma, Inc. portfolio of brands.
About Clarifai
Clarifai is an artificial intelligence company that excels in visual
recognition, solving real-world problems for businesses and developers
alike. Founded in 2013 by Matthew Zeiler, a foremost expert in machine
learning, Clarifai has been a market leader since winning the top five
places in image classification at the ImageNet 2013 competition, and
predicts more than 1.4 billion concepts in photos and videos every
month. Clarifai’s powerful image and video recognition technology is
built on the most advanced machine learning systems and made easily
accessible by a clean API, empowering developers all over the world to
build a new generation of intelligent applications. The company has
amassed a suite of clients that range from Fortune 500 companies to
startups and small development teams, including Buzzfeed, Trivago,
500px, StyleMePretty, and many more. Clarifai is headquartered in New
York City with an office in San Francisco.
