Nowadays, online and mobile shopping growth has skyrocketed compared to window store retail. However, most shoppers are familiar with the inconvenience of scrolling through thousands of products to find one that is just right. In fact around 80% of shoppers don’t know what they are looking for when they browse e-stores, and 74% of online consumers become what they call frustrated shoppers when products appear that don’t match their nuances or interests. With this setback, it poses an issue for omnichannel retailers: If e-commerce is proving to be a channel with exponential potential for retailers, how can they relieve frustrated shoppers in a way most similar to the in-store experience.
The solution is MIX. Founded in 2015, Materiall presents product discovery and visual search technology for omnichannel retailers that parallels a sales associate who is constantly listening to a customer's evolving needs. MIX allows e-stores to individualize their catalogs per customer, and creates dynamic showrooms for each user.
Materiall uses human merchandising intelligence from offline shopping to create their MlX customer engagement approach that uses data in an adaptive way to keep up with the quickly learning mind of a shopper. Material makes use of a more revolutionary form of AI, as well as their patented engagement learning engine that changes based on what they call the user’s velocity of intent. With every interaction the customer has with the site, there are a multitude of reasons for their choices, from this the intelligence learns from the choices and adapts. From liking or disliking products to viewing custom online showrooms for each customer, MIX makes it possible to fully individualize how customers view retailer’s products which will in turn increase conversion. Users actually end up looking at three times more products than usual with MIX.
Retailers also have amazing benefits from Materiall’s technology MIX. Some problems for the common retailers is the lack of insight on data, because they aren’t collecting the right data. Retailers often look at simply attributed data that surveys how their supply is affected rather than attributes that address the demand. The bigger issue? Omnichannel retailers simply can’t maximize the ROI on their catalogs, which leads to unsold inventory and inefficient flow of product. The solution that MIX brings is the increase of customer insight and directed customer engagement, that will help make better predictions from consumer, product, and operational analytics.
What makes Materiall special is its personalization of the shopping experience, and it’s unique combination of AI, machine learning, and offline merchandising techniques. Further, Materiall has created a stronger and new way to improve recommendation engines. Most other engines use previous consumer behavior and similarities to other consumers; common examples would be Netflix, Amazon etc. whereas MIX has demand based categories that adapts and learns from the consumer’s decisions. It gives you the full experience without having to browse thousands of products.
They have even built adapters to some of the biggest ecommerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, and Hybris where business owners can integrate Materiall’s technology tools all within a mobile app. Materiall was in fact chosen by the Alchemist as part of their Class XXIV along with only 21 other companies.
Our team at Linden3 Ventures is very confident in the future of this company especially due to the intelligent team behind Materiall. Co-founder Bharat Vijay was one of Yahoo’s first few employees, where he became the creator of Yahoo Data Systems. Vijay has also built Amazon’s search engine in India (A9), and led Amazon India. Similarly, co-founder Anand Ramani was also one of the first few Yahoo engineers, and was the creator of Yahoo Multimedia search. As one the technologies earliest engineers, we are confident that the team leading Materiall are the best in the business. Their passion, creativity, and overpowered intelligence already shows potential for how team Materiall can change e-commerce entirely.
Materiall genuinely set themselves apart from other UX shopping experience because of their dynamic collections that combine the AI technology, trends, and expertise. They bring visual intelligence to a static screen. Our team is eager and thrilled to be part of a revolutionary technological advancement in e-commerce.