MOVE FORWARD: Tagwalk adds trend forecasting to its services.
The Paris-based fashion search engine launches a new AI-powered dashboard that combines detailed tagging derived from 410,000 images from more than 1,300 brands with insights gathered from the search histories of its community of 300,000 fashion professionals.
“We realized we had so much information (in Tagwalk) that there was definitely a way to predict and understand what products were being made and what products were performing well,” said founder and CEO Alexandra Van Houtte.
After eighteen months of internal development, the new service takes the form of a prediction dashboard divided into categories ranging from colors and materials to themes, style and even beauty. Trends are identified through views, performance and rankings calculated without human intervention.
“Our audience was really successful in giving us a new model for predicting and analyzing trends that doesn’t yet exist in the market,” Van Houtte said.
Users can also explore keywords and searches that led to specific brands, as well as compare trending terms and behaviors. It also offers reading on the demographics and territories of users who searched for these trends.
Brand-focused and trending views on Tagwalk.
Courtesy of Tagwalk
Tagwalk described the new feature as a solution to combat the “excessive search load” that has led to missed opportunities for fashion companies and could help combat the overproduction of unwanted items.
For brands like Adidas, a long-time customer of Tagwalk’s existing reporting service, real-time analytics and data quality are a major selling point, according to Therese Hermann, head of hype at the sports giant.
“Knowing what our consumers are buying elsewhere not only helps us offer our (wholesalers) exactly what they need and will sell, but also strengthens our product teams in their decision-making and sales process “Hermann told WWD in a statement. e-mail.
Van Houtte stressed that the new feature would not replace designers, but rather help brands “calibrate a little better,” she said.
In addition to designers using the information to guide their designs, Van Houtte noted that the information could be used by merchandisers to curate an assortment of products, but also by social media managers looking to tailor their next posts to what consumers watch.
For the seven-year-old French company, the addition of the dashboard is part of a broader overhaul of its service offering.
While brand searches and lookbook viewing remain free, keyword searches and moodboard creation are funded by a paywall introduced in the fall, priced at 100 euros per year, with a significant discount for students . Access to the trend forecasting dashboard starts at 2,100 euros per month.
“What we didn’t want is people to depend (only) on us for consulting and reporting, we want people to use us on a daily basis as a fully automated SaaS service,” Van Houtte said. “Obviously it’s a game changer for us in terms of (business) but also in terms of technology, because we had all this data that wasn’t really being used properly or efficiently.”