After realising there was a gap in browsing, discovering and shopping for soft goods online a year and half ago, Google has launched Boutiques.com.
Currently only available to the US and women’s fashion, it is a personalised shopping experience that lets customers find and discover fashion goods, by creating their own curated boutique or through a collection of boutiques curated by celebrities, stylers, designers and fashion bloggers.
Boutiques uses computer vision and machine learning technology to visually analyse each customer’s taste and match it to items that they’d like.
Munjal Shah, Google product management director, said on the official Google blog that Boutiques will bring together a combination of outfits suited for a diverse range of styles.
“First we partnered with taste-makers of all types. We asked them not just to curate 10-50 great items they loved, but also to teach our site their style and taste. They did this by telling us what colours, patterns, brands and silhouettes they loved and they hated. They took a visual quiz that taught the site to understand their style genre: Classic, Boho, Edgy, etc. Our machine learning algorithms use this information to enable you to shop all of the inventory in the style of that taste-maker, on top of the 50 items they’ve hand-curated,” she said.
“These days, bloggers, stylists and everyday fashionistas are expressing their sense of style online. We invited them to create boutiques so people could shop their diverse styles. But you have a unique and independent style too, so Boutiques also lets you build your own personalized boutique and get recommendations of products that match your taste.”
Additionally, Boutiques offers advanced search filters based on genre, silhouette, pattern, colour families and sizes, as well as inspiration photos to help shoppers create their look.