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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#820: From eTail: Stitch Fix's Noah Zamansky on bringing back the fun of shopping and integrating agentic AI into retail
00:25:17
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- [00:01]
Noah Szymanski
The agile brand.
- [00:07]
Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to Season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season we're going all in on Expert Mode, MarTech, AI and Customer Experience, talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love. I'm Greg Kilstrom, your host and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of martech, AI and marketing ops. Hit subscribe or Follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And make sure you check out our sponsor Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world applications. For more information, go to teksystems.com now let's dive in.
- [00:50]
Reed
Consumers aren't lacking for choice. Instead, they're usually drowning in a sea of options. And it's up to brands to find ways to go beyond simply removing friction and bring back the joy in shopping. Adding AI and agentic AI into the mix can unlock new opportunities, but also brings with it new challenges. We're going to talk a little about all of it so we're recording here at ITEL Palm Springs. And to help me discuss these topics, I'd like to welcome back to the show Noah Szymanski, VP Client Experience at Stitch Fix. Noah, welcome back, Greg.
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Noah Szymanski
It's great to be back and great to be here in Palm Springs.
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Reed
Yeah, I think this is episode three, maybe four you've been on. So returning champion here. So always great to chat. It really is.
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Noah Szymanski
It's episode three. Reed. It's great to chat. Greg. Exciting, exciting to be here and share what's happening at Stitch Fix.
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Reed
Yeah. And for those that didn't catch one of your previous episodes, do you mind giving a little background on yourself and your role at Stitch Fix?
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Noah Szymanski
Yeah. So yeah, like you said, I'm the VP of Client Experience and for those who don't know Stitch Fix, we're the leading online styling experience and service that helps clients discover styles that they love and makes them feel and look their best. And yeah, I work with an amazing team of engineers, data scientists, product managers and designers who are redefining the future of personal style styling and really coming at it from an angle of data driven innovation and human centric design.
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Reed
Yeah, great.
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Framer Representative
Great.
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Reed
Yeah. So let's dive in here and talk about a few things, but want to start with just one of the things that I teed up in the intro, which is just how inundated consumers are with choice. And so the path to purchase is defined by this choice paralysis and consumers drowning in a sea of options. How is Stitch Fix cutting through this to make shopping actually feel fun and personal again.
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Noah Szymanski
Absolutely. I mean, shoppers, it's hard work shopping today, right. And at Stitch Fix, we really are coming at it from a different angle and redefining that. And we think that shopping should start with inspiration. And that's why we recently launched Stitch Fix Vision. I think we talked a little bit about it in Boston, but I think we didn't go into too much depth. But essentially, it's a style visualization experience that allows clients to see themselves in the outfits, and all they need to do is upload a selfie and a full body image. And we share. We generate images of the clients in outfits that are inspiring and they're fully shoppable. And so it really kind of changes the kind of psychology behind the whole shopping experience. Going from like, hey, there's a lot of hard work and scrolling to, you know, and here's like, a shirt that looks good on a person to, oh, my God, that looks great on me. And so that's recently launched. And so that's really how we're thinking about, you know, bringing back the experience and actually launching experiences that make the shopping experience a lot more fun. And, you know, when we were in Boston, we talked about a couple other innovations, from inspiration to agentic AI and to our Connect experience. The net sum of that is really pulling together inspiration and experiences that are powering our stylus and really highlighting the human connection within our experience. That is making the shopping a lot more fun for our clients.
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Reed
Yeah, well, and to the vision thing, I think part of it, part of that decision paralysis is just, you know, it. It's tough to choose between things that sometimes they're similar, but there's subtle differences, and to be able to actually see it without having to get it shipped and, you know, all that stuff is like, it's pretty fun. So as a. As a Stitch Fix customers I've. I've shared before. I'm looking forward to that, to. To using that as well. I know you guys prepared something for me as well, so I'm gonna. I'm actually gonna share that in the show notes so people can. Can take a look. But, yeah, I mean, it's got to save a lot of not only time, but also just some of that. Okay, what's. Of these two options? What's going to be better, right?
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Noah Szymanski
Absolutely. And when we think about the experience for the client, you nailed it. It's like two years ago, we kind of had to have that moment of shipping out a fix, which is an amazing experience on its own, but with vision now, it kind of short circuits that and allows you to see a lot of different options and gives the client a sneak peek or like, into the future of what's possible. And, you know, for me, Greg, it's been just so fun just to get these images. And I haven't been able to resist just shopping like, oh, that's a cool hoodie, and just buying it on the spot. And I think that's really what we're trying to do is just evolve this model. Right. We've got such a great experience with our stylists, but also supplementing with this inspirational experience for our clients that allows them to really visualize themselves. It's been a game changer.
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Reed
Yeah. And I think to go down a tangent a little bit further here, I think there's risk in buying stuff online and kind of getting it. So in one way, you're minimizing that. I think what I like about getting that, you know, that box in the, in the mail is sometimes there are some unexpected things that I wouldn't have necessarily chosen. And yet a stylist sees something and it's like, oh, wow, that works. Like, again, I wouldn't have necessarily chosen that. But so being able to see that and preview that in real time, I think minimizes, as a customer, it minimizes risk, I would imagine, as a business. It also, you know, helps with that whole. That whole process as well, right?
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Noah Szymanski
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It really does. And you know, from. If we think about it, the inspiration is driving our clients really to exhibit those behaviors. And you talked about the business impact, the impact that it's having on our clients is. We're measuring that. Clients are using vision, are. They're coming back more frequently. They love it. Customer satisfaction is very high, and it's a sticky experience. And so it allows them to kind of short circuit that experience, short circuit and accelerate the discovery experience. The other interesting and fun thing is that because it's just really interesting and fun to shop this way. A lot of our clients are sharing with their friends and family. And we're seeing that kind of behavior really catch on. And it's creating a growth loop from our clients to their friends and family. And those clients are. The recipients are converting at a much higher rate. And so I think we're onto something.
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Reed
We're seeing.
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Noah Szymanski
It was really early in the. When we, when we talked in August in Boston, but since then we've been learning a lot about, you know, the. This real time experiment that we're running with our clients seeing the great things that we want to see. And we're really excited to really, like, push it and bring it to more of our clients so they can experience it.
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Reed
Yeah. And from that. From that sharing perspective, too, I would imagine, you know, as you're saying, it's a lot more compelling for me to share a photo of myself versus a photo of a shirt or a sweater or something. Right. So it's like that viral component, you know, kind of. It plays on the emotions, too, Right?
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Noah Szymanski
Yeah. And, you know, I mean, I think about it like, you know, in the old days, old days, you went to a mall with your friends and you tried something on. And, like, you know, moving into online retail, there's been so many great things happening there, but one of the things that, you know, it is it's a more solitary sort of experience. And so I like to say, like, shopping is a team sport. And I think that is exactly what that experience affords towards our clients is that, you know, that moment to say, like, you know, to share something with their loved ones that they're excited about.
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Reed
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, in that way, it's that balance of, you know, as you were saying, you know, E commerce there. There definitely needs to be a predictive and an automated component of it.
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Noah Szymanski
Yes.
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Reed
What kind of the value add is the emotional component. So how do you. How do you think about that? The balance there?
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Noah Szymanski
Yeah, absolutely. We've been in the business of predictive modeling recommendations for 15 years. That's really been at the cornerstone of why our service works so well. And our clients trust us, and they provide us with a lot of feedback on why they keep things, why they like things, and when it goes wrong, why they don't. And so the more our clients kind of share that information with us, the better the service gets. So that's like trust is kind of the foundation that's delivered. And then this inspiration piece is really starting to create that human connection. But for us, we're so excited by the AI innovation. At the same time, we've got an incredible community of stylists, and our clients come to us for that human connection. At the end of the day, I really think that in a world that's accelerating with more AI innovation and making all of our lives so much easier.
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Reed
Yeah.
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Noah Szymanski
That human connection is going to be a luxury. Right, right. And so, you know, people, our clients want to. They want to connect with brands that have that. That human touch. I think, like, you know, there's. That's going to become A differentiator. And so in a lot of ways, this is a moment that I feel like Stitch Fix has been preparing for for 15 years. But, you know, and on the Stylus side, like, we have been investing in, you know, counterintuitively, like, people ask us, like, hey, AI is helping so much in the experience, like, are you pulling back on Stylist? And it's like, absolutely not. It's the opposite. If you look at what we've actually done over the last 18 months, we launched Stylus Profiles, which allowed our clients to really connect with the stylist and say, like, hey, here's. This is what they're interested in and this is like their expertise and really build that connection. And with the launch of Connect in August, that's really, this is our experience. It's a chat based experience that allows clients to chat directly with their stylist and, you know, for an upcoming, you know, styling need or styling advice or just to share feedback. In a dynamic chat experience that's also shoppable, you can share different kinds of, you know, like, images and things like that. It's about building that connection. And so, you know, when you hear stories from our clients, you know, I love this story about Jenna, one of our clients who's, you know, like many of our clients are going through, you know, body transformation journeys with GLP1 medication and there's this opportunity to do an entire wardrobe refresh. And we're helping a lot of our clients go through this. And Jenna messaged your stylist and Connect and saying, thank you so much for helping me rebuild my wardrobe and rediscover my personal style. You gave me the confidence to really buy nice things for myself again. And so that connection, we feel is irreplaceable and can't really be replicated through any kind of automation.
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Reed
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's really. Yeah. Instead of going in one direction or the other, it's kind of maximizing each in their own way.
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Framer Representative
Right.
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Reed
So like the personal touch plus the AI and now the agentic approach as well, right?
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Noah Szymanski
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I'm a techno optimist. Right. So I think that we're. And what we're finding is that it is freeing up, you know, the time for stylists to, you know, apply, spend more time doing the things, creative things and finding moments of serendipity. And, you know, you mentioned agentic and maybe I'll just share a little bit what we're learning about the AI style assistant, which was another thing we talked briefly about in August and what we've been learning since then, and just for your listeners, the AI styling assistant is it's an agentic experience. But think about it as like, we're really trying to solve the challenge that our clients have, which is like, hey, I actually don't know what I'm looking for when I talk. When it comes to stitch fix and you're reaching out to my stylist, how can you help me articulate that and visualize that? I'm going to Palm Springs for Etail. I need a bunch of outfits. What's the vibe? And so we are engaging clients in a real dialogue, natural language and generating, when I say multimodal generating real time looks and vibes of outfits in real time that the clients can see and then they can rate them and then package it all together into a, essentially a lookbook and a note to the stylist. And so that experience is like, as we're learning, is performing super well for our clients. And what's behind the scenes, there is a lot of different kinds of things going on. Right. In terms of the agentic piece now being able to string together, hey, we understand your style profile. The outfits are great brands, how to compose it together, how to speak to you, what you've used in your prior. Sorry, what you. You've kept in your prior fixes, the context and the client history. And then, you know, optimize for creating a request note that is really helpful for the stylist to go and do what they do best, which is to style you.
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Reed
Yeah. And I think the interesting thing that, I mean, one hearing you describe it, I mean, the technology behind it, to your point, there's a lot of things, there's a lot of pieces, but it doesn't sound like agent, you know, like, I think in my mind there's often this very technical, very, Even like a ChatGPT interface kind of thing happening there, but it sounds very. It still sounds human. And it also is informing the human at the end of the loop.
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Framer Representative
Right.
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Reed
List the stylus. So it's like, it's an interesting application, at least from my perspective, in how to do that and also keep the human as part of the process. Right?
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Noah Szymanski
It absolutely is. And it's. Yeah, if you think about it, it's kind of putting the tools at the, you know, at the interface of our clients and the stylists. There's so much work happening in the backend processes with, as you mentioned, like, you know, all the coding tools that we're using to drive efficiency and to Build faster and to streamline all the, you know, all the operational stuff. But yeah, it is the interesting thing about as you, as you mentioned quite rightly is like, you know, putting it in the hands of our stylists and clients and learning how they're reacting to it and the performance that we're measuring is as good or better than just a normal request note from like the metrics that we measure in terms of hey, this completion, successful outcomes for our clients. And so what's encouraging to us is it's, it's very early days, right? The models are, we're, we're working on improving the models and like the relevancy and fine tuning and thinking about, you know, how we can incorporate new kinds of, you know, media and make that experience even potentially shoppable for the clients. So there's so much possibility there to
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Framer Representative
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Reed
So what, what would you say is maybe a, either an unexpected challenge or maybe a learning along the way in doing that? Because again, what you're talking about, there's, I think I, and I think that's, that's a great UX or technology in general is when it doesn't feel from a customer perspective like it's complex. But I know from doing this kind of stuff there's a lot going on behind the scenes there. So like what's a learning from that?
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Noah Szymanski
Yeah, I think the learning for us was just how quickly I think we underestimated how quickly the models were moving, and we had to essentially reset our outlook on the world every three months as the models were evolving. Right. And I think one of the biggest learnings for us is like, hey, traditional playbooks, experimentation, coming up with a customer need and trying to solve that and iterate quickly, that still applies. But the thing that we had to learn is, okay, in a world where the technology is not there yet, but in the next two to three months will be there, how do you plan for and take those calculated bets and leaps of faith at times, knowing that the pace of which things are moving in terms of some of the boundary conditions for us, or what was holding us back was image generation time, for example, quality and the speed at which things advanced has been a big learning for us. And what we've done with it, too, Greg, is just trying to think about building with modularity and flexibility so that, you know, we can experiment as new advances come out.
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Reed
I'll make a rare sports reference here. It's like the Wayne Gretzky quote. It's like, skate to where the puck is headed. So it just reminds me of that because. Yeah, to your point, I mean, with. With, you know, the LLMs changing rather, in some cases, I think there's case studies, you know, a little chaotically. Sometimes it's. You gotta just trust that it's gonna kind of play out to some. I'm sure there's risk, you know, risk management and stuff like that along the way, but, yeah, it's sort of. Everybody's kind of trusting that these things are going to move at the pace that either they have been moving or that they think they should. Right?
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Noah Szymanski
Yeah, absolutely. And that's the interesting thing is, like, how far out do you go and how much risk do you like to take? And. And sometimes you get it wrong. But I think we are. Yeah, we've been taking more calculated risks. And, you know, I think that. Yeah, like, I think that the payoff for us is. Is a higher ability to move faster. Doesn't always work, but that. I think that's the game we're all playing right now.
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Framer Representative
Right?
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Noah Szymanski
Yeah.
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Framer Representative
Right.
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Reed
Yeah. I mean, every experiment can't be successful. Right, so.
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Noah Szymanski
Exactly.
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Reed
If you learn from it, that's successful, right?
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Noah Szymanski
Yes.
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Reed
Yeah.
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Noah Szymanski
Yeah, 100%. And, you know, a lot of things that, like, as we were building things like vision, you know, the pipelines and the infrastructure that we built in the. In even when the tech wasn't ready, felt like an investment. And it takes conviction to believe that things are going to work out. And when they do, it's having the infrastructure there and the architecture built for the data sources and the pipelines that do exist and the workflows that do exist puts you ahead. So that's kind of a big learning for us.
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Framer Representative
Yeah.
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Reed
Love it. Well, Noah, always great talking with you. Love what you guys are doing. A couple last questions as we wrap up here. What's been a highlight of Etel Pump Springs for you so far?
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Noah Szymanski
So far, it's been great to catch up with other product and marketing leaders here and refreshing to see that everyone is grappling with the same challenges and opportunities. And that's been really just refreshing and just the serendipitous moments to meet people within the industry but also in other industries has been a highlight for me. Comparing notes and. Yeah. And meeting a lot of great people.
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Reed
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what I've noticed and a few people have said the same to me this year. I feel like last year was way more theoretical and like, what if we did this and this year? Still that and still hype. There's always hype, but also some real practical. Here's what we did, and I think that's so powerful to be able to be surrounded by that stuff, too.
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Noah Szymanski
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It feels like we're in that moment where it's becoming very real.
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Greg Kilstrom
Right, right.
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Noah Szymanski
Yeah.
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Reed
Well, last question for you. What do you do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Noah Szymanski
Sure. So I think some of the fun coding experiments with Vibe Coding, for me has been a way to keep up with. Try to keep up with the speed at which things are happening and. Yeah, jumping in and teaching myself and just learning basically from the speed at which you can build things. I built a quick app for my daughter for her recent school trip to Spain, and it was a travel app for her. Nice.
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Framer Representative
Nice.
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Noah Szymanski
And journal. And so the other thing, we're doing that as a company, too. In a few weeks, we're doing AI Week. We're not just the tech team, but the entire company is diving into experimentation, building and prototyping and really embracing the tools that we have and really skilling up.
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Reed
Nice.
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Noah Szymanski
That's how we're approaching it.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, that's great.
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Reed
Well, again, I'd like to thank Noah Szymanski, VP of Client experience at Stitch Fix, for joining the show. You can learn more about Noah, Stitch Fix and ETEL by following the links in the show notes.
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Greg Kilstrom
This episode is brought to you by Tech Systems. They're leaders in full stack tech services, talent solutions, and helping companies put it all in action. You can learn more@teksystems.com and thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you like the episode hit, subscribe and drop a rating so others can find the show too. And if you're interested in consulting, advisory work, or if you need a speaker for your next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKillstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S T R O M the Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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Noah Szymanski
The Agile Brand.