A Virtual Wardrobe Is Finally A Reality With The Vêtir App

Vêtir is an AI-driven shopping, styling, wardrobe curation and digital closet management app created by industry vet Kate Davidson Hudson. Tailored for the top 0.01% of global shoppers and their stylists, its AI learning capability provides an exclusive shopping experience that creates a hyper-personalized retail experience, closet digitization and white glove concierge stylist interface to redefine the way consumers shop, engage with and manage the lifecycle of their wardrobe. Davidson Hudson has already signed up celebrity stylists like Erin Walsh (who styles Anne Hathaway and Selena Gomez), Tom Brady, personal shopping sourcers and influencers like Priya Shukla to upload the contents of their closets to the app. The app operates on a marketplace model, with different retail partners plugging into the back end. Net-a-porter is the exclusive retail partner for the first year and Altuzarra, Gabriela Hearst and Khaite are direct brand partners.

Davidson Hudson is no stranger to retail, editorial and the fashion market. With 15 years of experience, she’s worked as a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar and Elle and co-founded retail shopping site Editorialist. Most recently, she was editor-in-chief and chief development officer at retailer Luisa Via Roma. The platform closed an initial fundraise in September 2023.

The Vêtir app

We spoke with Davidson Hudson to learn how Vêtir is ushering in a new era of luxury shopping experience through the power of data-driven personalization.

What’s the problem with the current retail models?

The fashion industry, particularly on the luxury end of the spectrum, is traditionally slower to evolve than other industries and right now we have a very fragmented system where brick-and-mortar, e-commerce, social commerce, personal wardrobing, the emergent personal shopper market and personal stylists all work across divergent digital channels, in multiple different micro ecosystems. We have incredible technological tools at our fingertips, yet our industry is one of the last to harness technology to create smarter systems that provide efficiency and personalization at scale.

How did your experience in editorial and retail inform your knowledge of retail, your customers, tech and editorial creative vision?

My career experience, to date, has really helped to cultivate a 360 view of the luxury consumer’s consumption habits—on both a content and product level. How you evolve the experiential value proposition in a digital environment is, in large part, through storytelling. And one of the first things I learned as an editor was the art and power of compelling storytelling. Vêtir evolves this idea in the digital realm, and offers a more scalable exclusive experience without the restrictions of a real estate footprint, time zones or geographic constraints. Through the power of its technology, Vêtir offers exclusive gated and behind-the-scenes shopping events that a brand extends invitations to on a personalized basis, not otherwise accessible to a standard-fare shopper in store or online.

What did you feel was missing in the personal styling and retail worlds that you wanted to solve with this app?

I think personal styling and the luxury shopping experience are limited by institutionalized inefficiencies in the system. Personal shoppers are relegated to the physical confines of a store or showroom footprint. Some can work in a clunky fashion across SMS text or Whats App, but they are doing so blindly without the visibility into a client’s existing closet or any functional data on how that client consumes. For example, a traditional personal stylist would need to psychically go into a client’s closet, bring garment bags of new clothing/ accessories options, style out looks between existing pieces in a clients’ closet and new pieces from brand pulls, then return everything the client didn’t want after the styling session. Adding insult to injury, when that store associate leaves their job to go to another company, the brand loses all of the valuable client data on that store associate’s device. Vetir allows a stylist or store associate to message 1 or 500 of their clients with new arrival options—with one click. They can also virtually go into multiple client closets and virtually style looks, or pre-style looks and share them with not one but multiple of their clients with one click.

What functionality are you particularly excited about?

Video commerce is one of the next frontiers in luxury shopping. We’ve built proprietary (patent pending) technology that allows a stylist or a brand to capture video on an iPhone, then make it immediately shoppable with product images appearing in sync with the video on a timestamp. On the VIC end, this will now also allow stylists and brands to create gated VIC shopping experiences, regardless of time zone or geography as clients can access and shop exclusive collections from anywhere around the globe. It will also allow for stylists or store associates to become their own content creators and monetize every experience throughout their day. Technology will never be a plug-and-play solve for a completely personalized luxury experience, but it can be harnessed as a powerful supporting player in a client’s fashion discovery journey. As a client interacts with the Vêtir product feed, Vêtir shoppable videos, the Vêtir chat, or uploads product to their digital Vêtir closet, the AI is creating a custom algorithm designed personally for that client.

The Vêtir app

How does Vêtir connect personal shoppers with VICs?

We believe that type of 1:1 personal sourcing is an increasingly important part of the customer journey so, for that reason, we are hugely excited that the Vêtir platform is the first and only platform on the market that seamlessly integrates these personal shoppers into the platform interface. We launched with an exclusive partnership with Front Row Live so clients will be able to directly shop her feed and add those items to their closet as they make purchases. In this way, Vêtir truly fulfills its mission to become the one centralized touchpoint for every step of your shopping and styling journey.

Vêtir’s white glove closet digitizing service allows for a team will go to a very important client (VIC)’s home, photograph their closet (paging Cher Horowitz) and upload the images for them. To learn more about Vêtir, click here.

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