Julie Bornstein’s Daydream is releasing an AI-powered chatbot for fashion-related shopping
Daydream, the innovative startup led by e-commerce veteran Julie Bornstein, is officially launching its AI-powered chatbot dedicated to fashion-related shopping. This comes nearly a year after the company successfully secured a substantial $50 million in seed funding, signaling a strong belief in its vision to revolutionize online retail search.
After a period of rigorous testing with a select group of users, Daydream’s sophisticated chatbot is now accessible to the public in a beta phase. New users embarking on their shopping journey with Daydream will be prompted to provide essential details such as their name, birthdate, preferred price range, and any specific brand affiliations. This initial setup helps the AI tailor recommendations from the outset.
The chatbot offers a highly intuitive interaction model. Users can articulate their desires through natural language queries, such as “I want a dress to wear to the wedding this summer in Paris.” Furthermore, the platform supports visual search, allowing users to upload an image and augment it with descriptive text for a more precise clothing item search. A key feature is the ability to save desired items into personalized collections or refine searches dynamically within the chatbot interface. For items that are almost perfect, a “Say More” button enables users to modify specific attributes like colors or style, offering unparalleled customization.
At its core, Daydream leverages a “style passport,” a dynamic profile built from the user’s onboarding preferences and ongoing feedback. This passport is instrumental in driving highly relevant daily inspirations and product suggestions. While Daydream currently redirects users to the merchant’s website to complete transactions – as it does not yet feature an integrated checkout flow – the startup earns a percentage from each successful sale. Impressively, Daydream boasts a catalog of over 8,000 brands at launch, with a continuous, cost-free onboarding process for new merchants.
Julie Bornstein, who brings a wealth of experience from executive roles at industry giants like Nordstrom, Urban Outfitters, Sephora, and Stitch Fix, shared her motivation behind Daydream. She observed that “search has always been the forgotten child” in e-commerce, often failing to meet complex customer needs. The advent of generative AI, particularly tools like ChatGPT, has shifted consumer behavior, training them to engage with more nuanced prompts. Daydream aims to capitalize on this, empowering users to ask broad, occasion-based questions that go beyond simple keyword searches like “a red dress.”
Maria Belousova, who assumed the role of CTO at Daydream earlier this year, highlighted the significant technological advancements underpinning the platform. She explained that traditional search engines often fall short by relying solely on keyword matching. Daydream, in contrast, meticulously understands the intricate nuances of items within its vast catalog. “We are doing quite a bit to understand the details of the product, such as knowing stylistic attributes like embellishments, silhouette, or even social attributes like who would wear this dress, such as a bride or a guest in a wedding,” Belousova stated. This deep understanding, combined with image visual recognition, allows Daydream to fulfill highly detailed and sophisticated user queries.
Looking ahead, Daydream has ambitious plans for the coming year. Future enhancements include enabling users to provide explicit negative feedback, for instance, “Don’t show me any four-inch heels.” The company also intends to experiment with a feature that suggests perfect matches for an existing item in a user’s wardrobe, alongside fostering social sharing by allowing users to share their saved collections with friends and family for feedback. Another intriguing prospect is the ability for users to adapt and modify existing collections from other users using AI, fostering a collaborative and personalized shopping ecosystem.
Daydream enters a burgeoning market where several innovative players are already making strides. Startups like Deft and Cherry are actively developing multimodal search capabilities for shopping, pushing the boundaries of how consumers discover products. Concurrently, tech behemoths such as Amazon and Google are heavily investing in integrating AI-powered features to enhance product discovery and streamline the purchasing process across multiple retail platforms. Daydream’s unique blend of deep fashion expertise and advanced AI positions it as a significant contender in this evolving landscape.
