Personalisation, on point!

After closely monitoring and working within the fashion retail industry for well over a decade, Vladimir Radojevic the Co-founder & CEO of DRESOS came to the realisation that what customers really want is a much more personalised shopping experience. That’s how DRESOS was born.

Immersed in the fashion retail industry, Vladimir observed an enormous gap in the ecosystem and identified unmet customer needs. This is when he felt the urge to build a brand that helps the customer get access to personalised fashion right at their doorstep, free of charge. Destiny too had his best interest in mind and helped him connect to his Co-founder and Chief Styling Officer Aleksandar Jankovic to take forward his plan of disrupting the ecosystem with a customer-centric product fit.

Radojevic cites from research that 70% of customers prefer to shop from brands that demonstrate a personalised approach, and this is where he felt the need to offer the customer personalised outfits for any occasion put together by a stylist. DRESOS works on an asset-light format and suggests to customers a list of products, that fit their style and fashion needs, and sends them boxes with product recommendations alongside a personal handwritten note from the stylist. The customer can pay for what they choose from their box and return the rest. Here, the styling and courier are free of charge.

What sets them apart?
“Our asset-light approach helps us to reduce wastage as we work through recommendations and do not actually store products. This helps us offer the customer a bigger assortment of products at one go and also makes us a true tech company, which is the need of the hour,” Radojevic comments. In fact, this strong personal stylist tech is built on AI and is a sophisticated engine that helps decode the customer’s styling needs with more focus and understanding. There are several parameters that the styling tool is built on and whenever a customer accesses the styling quiz, the tool picks up the data and then tracks it to recommend the most relevant product to the customer.

“It only gets better for returning customers. This is because the AI engine becomes more accurate every time a customer makes a purchase or gives feedback by returning an item. It stores the customer preferences and runs through the same whenever the customer returns to get recommendations. This AI model can generate new outfit solutions and also learns the items customer liked or bought. We have also seen customers coming back and asking for particular product or specific category e.g., white t-shirt assortment or navy-blue polos.

Breaking the clutter
Retailing fashion cannot have a cookie-cutter approach, Radojevic stresses and that’s where DRESOS stands to revive the customer journey with tech-enhanced recommendations. “DRESOS not only personalises the shopping basket, but it also looks to serve people with convenience. Customers who love to shop from the comfort of their home, appreciate personalisation, and choose quality over everything else is our right target audience,” Radojevic confirms and adds that online shopping guided by a stylist will be here to stay for quality-conscious customers, irrespective of how the brick-and-mortar category blooms.

Radojevic explained that customers can register on the website, take the style quiz and a dedicated stylist will be in touch with them over WhatsApp or phone. A stylist then asks a few or more questions to understand better what the customer needs. DRESOS records all this information in its system to streamline recommendations. However, he says that this process is changing and within a couple of months the recommendations will become real-time and will be shown to the customers as a prediction list right on their screen and they can choose what they want to be sent home.

Almost 40% to 50% of the items from the recommended DRESOS box is purchased by the customer and the rest are returned. Radojevic mentions that the more accurate the AI becomes over time, the lesser will be the returns. The idea is now to make the personal stylist sharp, ready with more recommendations, and more data-driven. Raising additional funding is a priority for DRESOS at this point and they are currently doing equity crowdfunding on Eureeca where everyone can invest. On the business side, DRESOS is looking to expand to Saudi by the end of 2024 and eventually throughout the Middle East and aims to have over 100,000 registered users.

While that is on the customer side, Radojevic and the team is also looking to partner with big retailers and brands so they can leverage their software for online product recommendations at scale: AI Stylist. This he feels will help develop the entire fashion ecosystem more and allow each brand to understand the customer even better. For the future, he looks to build a 3D prototype where customers will be able to try and check their garment fits in advance and use the predictions each time they decide to shop offline or online.