Google coders play fashion and rely on AI to help clothing bosses save tens of millions
2022-04-15
Zhiyi Technology
"AI-based flexible supply chain solution provider for clothing", today's protagonist's business may be very unfamiliar to you, but there is a high probability that he has taken out the wallet of his customers.
His customers include well-known clothing brands such as Peacebird, Semir, UR, and Ubras, and the company received tens of millions of dollars in Series A financing in the year it was founded, and recently announced the completion of three consecutive rounds of financing of nearly 100 million US dollars.
Why is he favored by capital and customers?
To put it simply, Zheng Zeyu's Zhiyi Technology uses artificial intelligence to tell customers what styles are the most popular, what styles are the most profitable, and provide one-stop clothing design supply chain services.
"We hope that through design selection, we can open up the closed loop from design to supply chain at the back-end and provide integrated solutions for brands." Zheng Zeyu, founder and CEO of Zhiyi Technology, said in an interview with a reporter from "21CBR".
Zheng Zeyu used to work at Google as a senior engineer, focusing on big data improvement and AI processing and analysis. It was this experience that made the science and engineering man discover that the application of AI in the clothing industry is still in the "primitive stage".
In 2015, Zheng Zeyu and several colleagues at Google founded Caiyun Technology to provide AI and operational solutions for domestic enterprises.
"In the energy industry, I am at most an outsourcer, if it is replaced by the clothing industry, which is in urgent need of technical support, we areThere is the possibility of becoming a super-large platform, and there is even an opportunity to lead industrial change。”
In recent years, from Taobao and Pinduoduo to Douyin, the speed of traffic change has intensified. Zheng Zeyu found in contact with garment companies that the industrial chain has suffered a huge impact from the traditional futures ordering system model to the fast reverse mode combining online and offline.
How to capture traffic? AI has a place to play.
Brands that have risen in the traffic channel are good at using data to understand consumers, and Zheng Zeyu has to do itGrasp consumer demands more accurately, and feedback them into style design, helping clothing brands to undertake traffic and monetization。
In 2018, Zheng Zeyu, together with He Zhi, the former head of Ruhan's e-commerce supply chain products, and Wen Miaomiao, a former Coursera data scientist, jointly established Zhiyi Technology, which divides the company's services into two major sectors.
The first is to provide fashion designers with a digital selection tool.
In the past, some designers often went to high-traffic places such as subway stations or shopping malls to record the clothing data of the public, which was expensive and inefficient.
Zhiyi Technology has built a large-scale structured clothing database, precipitated a large number of high-quality clothing data assets, used to analyze the data of the whole market, and assisted designers to collect and sort out the required information more efficiently, so as to improve design production capacity and style research and development efficiency, and improve design quality.
At present, the image recognition accuracy of Zhiyi Technology is as high as 95%, and the style recruitment rate has increased from 30% in the traditional mode to 70%.
Zheng Zeyu told reporters that one of the advantages of Zhiyi Technology is that it can tap market trends and predict popular styles, so that clothing brands can establish more intuitive and objective market insights with higher cost performance.
"Since 2019, we have been helping Peacebird to choose a new dress, such as how to set a new price for a dress, how to price it, etc. Don't underestimate it, these decisions can affect a brand's revenue by millions or even tens of millions. Zheng Zeyu emphasized.
The second is to help brands look at the overall situation and explore opportunities.
Brands are often just working hard to know how many dresses they have, but it's hard to know if they cover all the popular styles on the market. By analyzing the front-end product selection information of popular brands, Zhiyi Technology lists relevant styles to help brands explore opportunities as soon as possible.
Up to now, the database has accumulated more than 1 billion clothing picture materials, 100 billion structured design elements, and more than 100,000 self-developed complete models of sample clothing structure.
Zheng Zeyu likened the development path of Zhiyi Technology to building a "stock trading platform".
The 1.0 stage is to develop software, based on data, to tell users what stocks will go up and what will fall.
In the process, it is indispensable to run in with customers. Zhiyi Technology is the first company to use data to empower designers, and the market recognition was not high at the beginning, at that time, Zheng Zeyu organized a large number of market research and product analysis and judgment.
In 2020, Zheng Zeyu finally had his first batch of customers, "They are more e-commerce, more sensitive to data, and willing to accept new things." ”
Affected by the epidemic, it has become a general trend for clothing brands to develop e-commerce channels, and the market acceptance and recognition of Zhiyi Technology have also risen.
The 2.0 stage is to prepare the fund and enter the trading mode from pure software.
As a pure SaaS platform, the software business is one of the two core businesses of Zhiyi Technology, and the company relies on providing functional modules and software account fees for brands. The other is the supply chain, which builds a full-link closed-loop service of clothing design from planning, selection, finalization, sample production to order production, so that brands can select models on demand and pay for orders.
"It is equivalent to me helping you to speculate stocks in a more scientific and effective way and obtain higher profits. In the apparel industry, we open the money through our own tools, and the brand places orders directly from it. ”
In the past three years, Zhiyi Technology's revenue has maintained a three-fold growth.Today, a large number of well-known clothing brands have become customers of Zhiyi Technology, including Peacebird, Semir, UR, etc.
During the external development, Zheng Zeyu also solved the problem of team structure internally.
Previously, the talents of Zhiyi Technology were mostly pure software majors, more dealing with code software, and the proportion of technical R&D personnel was relatively high, but now it is necessary to expand business in the supply chain of traditional industries, so Zheng Zeyu recruited many designers.
It is a daily operation to improve the design and selection ability of the tool according to customer feedback. Zheng Zeyu will regularly follow up and visit customers on the software user side to understand the real situation and results of their software use. "Using the software of Zhiyi Technology, each e-commerce clothing brand develops at least 10-15 popular models every year, and makes millions of direct or indirect profits."
Improving the software has also improved the brand's designer efficiency. "The vast majority of companies said that without increasing the number of designers, the design efficiency has been improved by about 3 times and the explosion rate and design accuracy by 1 time."
For the upcoming 3.0 supply chain improvement stage, Zheng Zeyu's goal is clear. “Through the design of a large number of orders, in order to leverage the back-end production, drive the integrated development of the supply chain, and achieve higher flexibility and intelligence.”
Clothing brings goods, and Zhiyi Technology is very good.
For Internet celebrities, the clothing industry is a double-edged sword. It is not like daily necessities, mainly relying on traffic and channels, if there is no professional selection and service system in the clothing industry, it is difficult for celebrities to go deep into the industry, and they will be burdened with the infamy of "rolling money".
With the help of Zhiyi Technology, Internet celebrities can quickly grasp the market trends of the clothing industry, and they can increase their fans because of the attractiveness of the clothing itself, and on the other hand, it also provides supply chain capabilities for Internet celebrities.
For brands, Zhiyi Technology has another value - a rich variety of SKUs to supplement its existing supply chain system.
Where there is demand, capital is never absent.
On April 6, Zhiyi Technology announced that it had completed three consecutive rounds of financing of nearly 100 million US dollars, including star VCs such as Hillhouse Venture Capital, Wanwu Venture Capital, Xianghe Capital, and CE Innovation Capital.
Why do you receive large amounts of financing in such a short period of time?
Zheng Zeyu believes that the most important reason is that although the clothing industry is located in a giant track, there has been no "giant" SaaS company to provide corresponding services.
Secondly, Zhiyi Technology takes design selection as an entry angle, tells the brand the popular trend in the market, what should be sold, and makes decisions for the brand, thus driving the initiative of the entire ecology, "which is more competitive than tools and process software." Coupled with trends such as live streaming and digital transformation, the industry has experienced a "butterfly effect".
Design can leverage orders, and orders can drive the supply chainZhiyi Technology took the lead in completing the 1.0 stage, the business model tends to mature, and the transaction volume has also reached a certain scale.
As of now,Zhiyi Technology's "Circle of Friends" has accumulated more than 2,000 brand customers, and the proportion of monthly active users of SaaS products exceeds 95%.In the future, Zhiyi Technology will continue to focus on clothing, and expand to shoes and hats, bags, accessories, home textiles, home furnishings and other fields.
"The apparel SaaS industry is a very pragmatic industry. The degree of data and intelligence in the industry is relatively low, and the start is late, and there are still a lot of opportunities. More and more companies want to participate in the digitalization of the apparel industry, but the use of software and products by practitioners requires a lot of time to educate and assimilate. Zheng Zeyu said.
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