Adore Me Launches Customer-Facing Gen AI Tool for Design
Adore Me has begun using artificial intelligence to bring personalization to a highly personal industry: intimates.
The Victoria’s Secret-owned brand launched a generative AI-powered design tool Thursday, called Adore Me by You (AM by You). The tool allows customers to write a prompt—like, for instance, “hydrangeas and sunflowers”—into the generative AI model, which then offers up three options based on a user’s input.
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The tool also overlays the design onto a bralette and panty set, giving users a preview of how the finished product will look. From there, consumers can add custom text to the band of the bra and panty.
Ranjan Roy, the brand’s vice president of strategy, said the idea for the technology came about at a company-wide hackathon in July 2023. While the team that proposed the idea had the ability to print garments during the hackathon, that initial effort was much less advanced than the resulting technology.
Roy said the brand developed the model behind the tool—a custom-trained stable diffusion model—in house based on the idea presented during last year’s hackathon. As of Thursday, the tool is publicly available, though the brand had been testing its pilot with existing Adore Me customers for a few months.
That pilot phase yielded high results around engagement. According to the company, 70 percent of users generated more than one prompt, with the average user inputting 5.4 prompts per session. On average, users’ site session times exceeded four minutes.
Roy said generative AI has the power to positively impact how well a brand can relate to its consumers, subsequently creating demand for custom products.
“Something that we realized is that when we become that initial touch point for image generation for a lot of these customers, that paints our company in a different way for them. It shows a level of promise and excitement around what our brand can deliver them that no one else can. To us, there’s a tremendous amount of value in that,” Roy told Sourcing Journal.
While personalizing sets for consumers provides the brand with value already, aggregating data around what consumers put into the generative AI model could also prove helpful.
Roy noted that shamrocks and four-leaf clovers were common search terms around St. Patrick’s Day, further validating consumer interest for existing products, like a St. Patrick’s Day-themed bra. But in the future, those insights could be helpful for new product development, Roy said.
“Even at the scale we’re at [now], there are definite trends that we’ve seen in terms of demand around color, around topics, subjects, shapes, these kinds of things. It’s certainly something that, at a large scale, the data becomes very interesting for us,” he said.
To print the sets, Adore Me works with MAS, a Sri Lankan manufacturer. The factory’s digital printing technology, called Prompt.ly, allows AM by You sets to be printed with 99 percent less water than would be required in a traditional printing process, the company said.
Roy said the sustainability benefits of the new print-on-demand sets go beyond water savings.
“Overproduction, for most of the industry, has always been the single biggest challenge from a sustainability standpoint,” he said. “If we can move toward a world where more and more products are manufactured and produced on demand and created uniquely [for] a customer, I think that can completely transform fashion from a sustainability standpoint.”
Adore Me’s site currently states that custom sets cannot be returned unless they have a defect or are damaged. To help mitigate issues with returns on custom products, Adore Me chose a stretchy, forgiving bra to begin testing with.
To date, Roy said, the brand has fulfilled more than 1,000 successful AM by You orders.
Though generative AI has brought buzz into the industry, many companies have only begun deploying text-based tools, like consumer-facing chatbots. Adore Me had already worked with text-based tools—even prior to the launch of ChatGPT—which Roy said helped the team understand the nuances of using generative AI.
Roy said that in the process of developing the model powering AM by You, the company put some strict parameters into place around what the model will or will not produce. Specifically, he said, the brand wanted to avoid concerns over copyright, profanity and sexually explicit content.
Anything a consumer creates with AM by You is subject to both automated and manual reviews. Images of every set get sent to an image API that checks for copyright, profanity and obscenity concerns, Roy explained. If the set passes that test, Adore Me sends the text on the bra and underwear bands to a text API that runs similar tests.
If a set fails either stage of evaluation, a human intervenes, Roy said.
“Anything that is deemed even a very low level of risk will be manually pushed to a human team, which includes myself and a few others who literally check off and visually monitor that everything is okay and that we’re happy with everything that’s being sent through [to print],” Roy told Sourcing Journal. “Anything that has shown zero level of risk according to the system will go through, but we will still periodically check through and try to catch something after the fact.”
Over the past two weeks, about 2 percent of all customers’ designs had to be manually reviewed. Roy said Adore Me’s checkpoints stopped it from printing designs that could have otherwise infringed on brands like Formula 1 and McLaren, characters like Rick and Morty and more.
Already, Roy said, customer feedback has helped the company learn more about what consumers expect and want from the tool.
For instance, the brand has received a number of requests to allow consumers to manually shift the positioning of their design on the set. Roy said that feature upgrade is “on the roadmap fairly soon.” Additionally, consumers want Adore Me to add more of its products to the AM by You line, so they can go beyond customizing the bra and panty set offered today.
Roy said the brand will continue to gather user insights as the tool grows—but noted that it has already shown strong outcomes for the brand. He said it provides a way for consumers to see their visions come to life.
“The promise of generative AI is that an idea in your head can be translated into something real,” Roy said. “Normally, that ‘real’ is just a digital output as an image or a photo on your phone or something, versus this actually can turn into a physical product—so really inspiring people to think about how AI made this little thought in [their] head turn into something that was delivered to [their] doorstep that captures that initial idea.”
