Visual search drives crowdsourced fashion trends

The accelerating shift to mobile commerce is changing online shopping in the UK, with social media and fashion blogging driving crowdsourced fashion trends.

Until now, unsophisticated technology has created a staid online shopping experience. But with shoppers more likely to buy an item of clothing worn by a fellow shopper, the traditional use of photos featuring professional models is falling out of favour.

According to Olapic, the visual marketing platform, 66 per cent of UK consumers trust user photos more than professional photos, with 39 per cent more likely to buy an item of clothing if it is worn by a fellow shopper, rather than a model.

However, the difficulty of developing an automatic method of linking crowdsourced photos to products has kept retailers from integrating them into websites and apps.

"Retailers are still focused on how they use social media and pictures to interact with buyers . . . but the technologies for turning these interactions into sales is still niche," said Pavel Marceux, technology, communications and media specialist at Euromonitor International.

"But that is due to change. In the UK it is only in the past two years that smartphones and high-speed mobile internet have become normal - plus the UK always follows the US with these kinds of trends."

US department store Macy's and luxury retailer Neiman Marcus have launched during the past year visual search software designed to expand Google's and eBay's services by enabling phone users to snap photos and search for matching products - rather than searching only in an existing stock of images.

This so-called "affiliate marketing" - when users snap photos and earn commissions when followers click through to retail websites - has exploded in popularity in the US.

In the UK, fashion start-ups such as Snap Fashion and Asap54 are following the American model to commercialise social media.

"When Instagram came about I thought the whole world was shifting towards the image . . . but people haven't gone into visual shopping because there's no inspiration in Google's image search," says Daniela Cecilio, founder of Asap54, which is backed by Carmen Busquets, the founding investor of Net-a-Porter.

"We hired a tech team in Portugal and developed everything in-house . . . the hope is that when big retailers in the UK like Topshop want to access customers in the same way they will come to us."

Cortexica, a spinout business from Imperial College, London, which provides the visual search software to Macy's, has used research on the human visual cortex to help computers "recognise" objects in poor-quality photographs that might be taken at a distance, from different angles or in bad lighting.

The 30-person team - which includes eight neuroscientists - spent seven years researching the human brain before adapting their technology for the fashion industry. This week it will launch an upgrade that will allow users to find matching shoes and accessories when they select a particular item of clothing.

Comb, a new London start-up that works with Cortexica, said the biotech sophistication is a big advantage in the UK, where visual search technology is still nascent.

"Apps like Pinterest and Instagram have huge userbases but they don't make money when one of [their users] links another to a shop," said Moeez Ali, Comb co-founder.

"We wanted to go into the area but it was only when we met Cortexica that we knew we could differentiate ourselves, because they don't have any other fashion clients in the UK but are very successful in the US."

Both Comb and Asap54 generate revenue by receiving a cut each time someone clicks through their apps to a retailer's website and are hoping to attract advertisers as mobile retailing continues to grow.

Euromonitor has forecast 53.3 per cent growth in the value of payments made by mobile phone during the next five years.

Comb also has plans to harvest search data and sell it to retailers. Mr Marceux says this element will be key to scaling the businesses: "The data side will be very lucrative . . . no one else is really [selling] it like this in the mainstream."

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