Two subjects I would not ordinarily put in the same essay: women’s fashion and nail bars. My credentials on the former run to an internship, during my A-level days, at a family firm dabbling in the trade. My qualifications on the latter amount to a great many hours spent in adjacent coffee shops.
I had dinner recently with a friend who runs a fast-growing chain of women’s fashion stores, with outlets in several of the largest shopping centres in the country. The focus is the 16 to 30 crowd, consumers of fast fashion: the range changes often and the customer lives on social media, so a competitive e-commerce offering — Instagram, TikTok, the website — matters enormously.
Twice a year the range changes, and each range has to be modelled for the collateral that goes on the website and into print. Models, stylists, photographers, studio time. For a business of that size it is a material line in the annual accounts, and one that recurs whether the season sells or not.
His e-commerce team — the team that was already there, doing the day job — has built an application, using commercially available AI tools, that renders images of each new range entirely by machine. He pulled the new range up on his phone over dinner. Website and Instagram, both live, both in front of paying customers, and I could not tell the difference. Nor, evidently, can the customers. The annual cost of producing the collateral has fallen by ninety per cent.
There was a postscript. The placement student, part-way through a year with the business, spotted that a tool built to solve an internal problem was also a product — every retailer of a certain size has the same twice-yearly photography bill. It is now sold to other businesses through a new website; two clients have signed, and their fees cover a decent slice of what the collateral still costs. The ninety per cent is drifting towards ninety-three.
And what of the savings? Sniffing an opportunity on a recent trip to China, my friend is putting them into a nail bar concept: AI measures the customer’s nails, AI generates the design, and a machine produces a perfectly matched, high-end acrylic stick-on to take away. Into the handbag they go, ready for the next emergency. A cost taken out of one business, funding a new revenue line in another he was not previously in. The first bar opens in London shortly.
There is nothing exotic in any of it. The tools are ordinary, rented by the month, available to anyone; what the firm supplied was a cost worth attacking and a team close enough to the business to see where the technology met it. The images are selling clothes today, and the clients are paying.
On the strength of the nail bar alone, I expect to spend rather less of my life in coffee shops.