Name: Introducing Your AI Stylist
Uploaded: 2025-10-16
Duration: 14 min 44 s
Description: AI is transforming not just business, but our lives as consumers. Alta is at the forefront of this evolution in fashion, changing how customers shop and style their closets. Founder Jenny Wang joins to give us a demo of how the platform works—alongside Alta investor Meredith Koop, stylist to Michelle Obama.

AI is transforming not just business, but our lives as consumers. Alta is at the forefront of this evolution in fashion, changing how customers shop and style their closets. Founder Jenny Wang joins to give us a demo of how the platform works—alongside Alta investor Meredith Koop, stylist to Michelle Obama.

Introducing Your AI Stylist

Conferences

Hi Fortune, this is Jenny from Alta showing you a quick demo of what we've built. Alta is your AI personal stylist. Alta styles you for any occasion, no matter the prompts. Upload your closet, digitize your items, snap, import, and organize what you already own. Try it on your avatar. Visualize any outfit directly on your alter ego. Plan what you're going to wear and keep track of what you've already worn. From celebrity street style to runway couture, see it first on your alter ego. Alta checks the weather, your luggage size, and your itinerary to pack for you. Alta, available on the App Store. Very fun, thank you, everyone. Uh, so Jenny, we just saw a demo of Alta in Action and thank you both for being here. Very excited to have you. Thank you. Many of us probably first saw something like this in the movie Clueless. There's been attempts to kind of bring that to life over the years, but not successfully so far. So why hasn't it existed until now? How did advancements in AI make Alta possible? Yeah and thank you so much for having us, Emma. I think Clueless is definitely an inspiration for Alta, and it's crazy because this year is actually the 30th anniversary of the movie, and I remember reading an article about how that movie was created and how the scene where she's like touching the screen and it's generating the yellow plaid outfit on her was actually a pre-recorded video that they had to time Alicia Silverstone. Touching the screen because obviously 30 years ago touch screens didn't exist and it's amazing to me to see how technology has evolved so rapidly over the last few decades. I actually struggled with this problem every morning I would feel so stressed deciding what to wear. I tried spreadsheets. I tried Apple notes, and I would always forget what I owned. I'd make a tornado in my room every morning. And it's actually kind of a very complex permutation where you have to think about what was what did I wear the last time I saw someone, what's the weather, what's on my calendar what's in the laundry, what are things that go together, what doesn't, what looks out of my body shape, etc. so there's all these factors that go into making this technology possible. And I tried to build this a few years ago. The state of the art in AI a few years ago was neural networks. Today it's the Transformer model which is the T and GBT, and when Ca GBT first came out over 2 years ago, I thought somebody needs to build this. I didn't see anyone else building this, so that's how also got started but fashion is probably one of the most complicated industries to apply AI because unlike a lot of other use cases where, like, for example, a more legal or finance AI, it's probably text in, text out fashion is three dimensional. Like you're wearing this like brown suit that has like structured shoulders and like a certain number of buttons. Mary is a very complicated outfit. I'm not gonna do it justice. And all of these are basically 3 dimensional features that we have to encode into the AI model, so. It's very it's 12 models under the hood. It's very fascinating. Um, Meredith, as we heard, you're a longtime stylist, including to First Lady Michelle Obama. If Alta had existed while you were first styling Mrs. Obama, how would you have used it and how do you use it today? Well, I think, uh, thanks for having me, by the way, um, what I love about Alta, there's several things. First, how I use it for myself, how I can potentially use it for clients, and I think one of the coolest things is the avatars because it really gives you that visualization. I mean, I make lookbooks for many clients, um, not just Michelle, but um, it helps you really visualize the outfit versus just seeing a flat image of clothing. Um, it's also a great way to organize wish lists and what you have in your closet, so I definitely would have used it had I had it in the past, and there's a lot happening in fashion tech right now. AI being deployed in different ways, um, Meredith, when you looked around, why did you invest in all of all the options out there? Well, to me there aren't any other options because Jenny is brilliant and That's really the, the primary reason that I'm involved is because when I met Jenny and knowing her work, her background, her skill, her Genius her intelligence to me I just see her as the reason you know and she's created this amazing platform with the help of her team and. To me that was just, it was a no brainer. Yeah, and we're talking about fashion and it's really fun, but Jenny, you're also a solo female technical founder who's raised I believe 8 figures in funding in AI. What is it like to be a female founder in this kind of next gen AI company era we just heard from another on stage. What were the challenges of building with this very lean team in this kind of new generation of startups? There are definitely very few female founders in AI, especially like technical or solo, and, but I also think it's an advantage in in some ways because many of my peers and former classmates are building things like vector databases and enterprise AI and shopping is a massive industry in fashion. Is an incredible space to be building in and I think when you think about the economic power that women everywhere holds in terms of purchasing decisions in the households, this is a massive opportunity for us and I think it just gives us an advantage and I believe at least half or so of your users are under 20, is that right? Yes, so what have you learned about this next generation that is growing up with AI as the standard? What's table sticks for them? It's really fascinating because when you think about middle schoolers, high schoolers, college students today, they're using ChatGBT to do their homework and it's they're just growing up on this technology. They're talking to their chatbot friends and for us it's been fascinating because before we launched on the App store we were in beta for many months. Most of our power users were. Female executives and lawyers and finance professionals and then after we launched on the app store we just kept them going viral on TikTok and then we drove a lot of user downloads that were students and I think it's the next generation where they're growing up on AI they expect AI to understand them and to understand their personal style and they're just also feeding the AI all of their personal information and that's a huge shift that any I think brands or retailers should be aware of because the. Users are expecting different from the techno differently from the technology tools they use and the way that they interact with AI and it's important to like meet them where they're at and for us it's like they're asking the AI every morning what I wear to school, what do I wear to my 16 year old birthday party at the trampoline park where we're eating pizza? What do I wear asking a guy like at like guy like to prom after school at the library like these are the sorts of queries that we need to service for that next generation. So interesting. Meredith styling is such an art, and as we just heard as well, the work he did with Mrs. Obama is literally the subject of like a beautiful new book that's coming out. So in general, how do you feel about AI coming into this space? Like what is the role of human stylists and the creativity that they bring in the AI era? Well, so I think there's a lot of different points on that. So for me, I am a stylist. I've been doing this for many years. It is an art, it is a craft, it is something that I have experience in, so. From my perspective, from my profession, it's a tool that I can use. I also think for the average person or any woman or man or any person out there having this in lieu of having a professional stylist because 99.9999999% of people are not gonna have a professional stylist working with them every day. It's a great tool. It's a great tool even if you did have a professional stylist just to have this to know what's in your closet, generating outfits and ideas for you. Every day is useful for everyone so yeah um we've been hearing from some retail CEOs this morning. What are the ways that you know obviously this is a consumer product but what are the ways that big companies, retailers, big brands should be thinking about this technology? How could it apply to them? It's a great question. LVMH is one of our investors, so I talked to them about this topic. Going back to what we mentioned before, I think the best shopping experience comes from the most personalized data and the most personalized data comes from any sort of consumer AI experience where you can in natural language or an image be able to express what you want right now if you and I were to go to a standard ecom website and we type in something like white dress for Wimbledon, we will. Likely get the same results, but on an AI platform those results should be personalized and re-ranked based on what the AI knows about you, the fact that like maybe you don't like to show off your arms or that you prefer to wear certain cuts of pants with certain sorts of shoes. These are the nuances that a sort of AI platform that has memory can learn over time and increase the level of personalization. And I think the Avatar is also my favorite feature. I like generate them every day. It's really fun to see like they're almost like little mini use um of yourself wearing your clothes and to also visualize what a potential purchase looks like on your body with things that you already own like what does this potential cowboy boot look like with these jeans that I already have is, I think it removes a lot of the mental barrier to making a purchase decision. And you mentioned some of your investors. What's the ultimate kind of revenue strategy here right now? A lot of your users are under 20. I imagine they're not paying that much money to use Alta, so how will this work eventually? It's a great question and I have always believed that if you build a product that people spend hours on every day and they're sharing uh their personal information in order to get more personalized recommendations and examples of this are TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. there are many ways to monetize in terms of our personal road map. There is going to be an affiliate purchase like strategy and revenue from there, but. We are thinking about other ideas from ranging from advertising to more premium features, for example, one thing we want to build is 3 dimensional video avatars and from an inference cost perspective that's very expensive AI to deliver but it is something that consumers, I believe, will pay for. Do you see, um, kind of the big tech players in AI trying to launch their own version of this? Obviously, Google has Google Shopping, like, what can they do? What can't they do? Yeah we've had a lot of outreach. And I think a big tech perspective you're already seeing it like I saw Walmart stock jumped a lot yesterday from the OpenAI partnership. There's a new era of agentic commerce we can check out on platform on any of these AI tools from Perplexity to attach to beauty. I think those work for most purchases outside of fashion because fashion and also beauty is, is so personalized and we also wanna create not just a utilitarian tool for shopping but a very. Fun and aspirational experience where it's fun to share outfits with friends on the platform. It's fun to generate your your own avatar and like cool backgrounds and we that that's what we're seeing in our own data and then I think the the other point here is the fact that. You want to use a platform that you feel like is getting better the more that you use it. That is the magic of AI like it's reinforcement learning with human feedback. And when you are telling all the things like I will not wear red sweaters with blue jeans or whatever, like on on Sundays I go to church and I need a dress that is that goes beyond my knees. These are personal preferences in natural language that you can feed an AI that will learn over time. How would you both suggest that the women in this room use also, I mean, I imagine we have some people who love fashion and find it to be a really amazing form of self-expression, some people who just want to figure out what to wear every day without thinking about it and find it stressful, and a lot of women who are, you know, in big jobs presenting who they are, making deals, want to feel powerful. How can Alta help them? I, I would say it's for everyone and it really, to some of what Jenny is saying, it engages with you the way you engage with it, and I think you need to use it consistently and often to get the best results. Um, so, Really, if you're into fashion, if you're not into fashion, if you would like the convenience or you relish in the experience, it doesn't matter. It's, it's for everyone. There's nothing about it that would preclude someone that isn't particularly interested in fashion. It's just about Using it starting getting your closet on the platform so you can start working with it and generating the outfits and seeing it and and enjoying it on some level. Yeah. Meredith, any examples that come to mind of a way that Alta has influenced something that you've been styling for yourself or for someone else um compared to what you might have come up with on your own if you weren't using it? Well, I mean, I helped sort of build it with Jenny, so I, I mean my imagination is kind of broad. If you, if we're using also we're getting the experience of working with you, but it, but I think really coming back to the avatars and that piece of it, it's just it is, it has this utility and it's also fun like I love that. I love that you can build these avatars you can put them together and share with people. I just think that's one of the coolest features. Because I remember when we started you would show me the lookbooks that you put together for your clients and you would have to download the image you have to remove the image like put them a little collages on the PowerPoint and now you can just generate it on their avatar so we got a peek into both of your brains if we use the platform. Awesome. Well thank you both so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you Emma. Thank you.