THE LIST

Future of X: THE LIST team shares how AI is transforming their sector As Head of Operations, Tiago Pinto ensures that our customers’ needs are met on a daily basis, overseeing customer service, partner service, payments, fraud, logistics, delivery and more. ▪ What drew you to join THE LIST? The AI spin on luxury fashion was definitely refreshing. Innovation can stagnate as a company grows, and I saw an opportunity to be at the forefront of this space. The ability to take over the challenge of hypergrowth and scale processes in a sustainable way appealed to me. ▪ How is AI transforming what you do? In customer service, AI's potential lies in streamlining routine tasks, freeing up our team to focus on high-value interactions. For questions like “Where is my order?” “How can I initiate a return?” customers want an answer fast, and that’s where AI shines. It's also enabling personalized recommendations at scale. AI is a major ally for fraud detection, with engines becoming smarter and more accurate at predicting and preventing fraudulent behavior. For marketplaces and platforms with several players in the supply chain, AI enhances fulfillment operations by making optimized choices from which a merchant can fulfill an order, meeting customer expectations while minimizing costs. ▪ What’s the next big thing for AI in e-commerce? Moving from reactive to proactive. Imagine AI predicting a customer’s needs before they even ask—helping us retain customers and improve their experience in real-time. How might we use data like Time Spent On Page to predict customer behaviors and prevent churn? The challenge is gathering the right data to make this a reality, especially for smaller companies.

Meet our Board! Next up, Greg Merrill. Greg is a seasoned advisor, executive, and entrepreneur with a 20+ year journey that has taken him from the health and fitness industry, to 3x company founder, to corporate executive at Nike, and now advising executives and boards on company growth and transformation.  His experience building high-performing teams spans manufacturing & supply chain, consumer brand & experiences, and technology. In his most recent role as Global Head of Digital Transformation at Nike, Greg led a centralized team bridging business, product, technology, and geography teams to plan, execute, and manage a portfolio of work transforming the economic engine of the enterprise value chain. Additionally, Greg is an investor and board member for companies in the consumer products, brand & retail, luxury fashion, technology, health & fitness, and sustainability industries. He serves as a venture partner at Oregon Venture Fund, which focuses on venture investments in the Oregon & SW Washington areas. Greg's proven track record of driving exponential growth through digital initiatives is a tremendous asset to THE LIST's mission of transforming the luxury sector with AI.

Meet our Board! Hosi Simon brings unparalleled expertise in building powerful consumer brands to THE LIST. With 25 years of experience in growing transformative culture and entertainment brands globally, Hosi recently served as COO of Space Perspective, a pioneering consumer space tourism company. He is currently launching a global entertainment company for Gen Alpha, creating immersive experiences that blend cutting edge technology, education and storytelling. During his 15 years at VICE Media, most recently as Global COO, he was at the heart of all aspects of strategy, creative and operations and led the company’s global expansion from an influential magazine to a cultural force that redefined media. Hosi played a pivotal role in VICE’s core businesses and brands, including VICE, VICE News, VICE Studios, VICE TV, and the creative agency VIRTUE. Prior to VICE, Hosi served as Head of International at both Rockstar Games, launching iconic titles like Grand Theft Auto, and the seminal label Matador Records. Hosi’s experience is immensely valuable as we build a leading luxury marketplace powered by AI at THE LIST.

Virtual try-on has been frustratingly bad for a long time, but LLMs are improving it 1000%. Take a look at what our API <GENESYS> did. All it had was a photo of our CTO + model 😆 Dmitrii and a flat photo of a gray sweater. We never even touched the product and the output looks catalogue ready. Before: 💸 Expensive studio shots of every garment  🧩 3D scans needed for each item 😖 Glitchy / low fidelity After: 📉 Huge reduction in studio photos needed 📸 Simple flat shot of the garment + one model shot 👌 High fidelity Game changing for customers and retailers.

AI outperforms the human eye  👀 We are only beginning to see the impact of Al on retail It’s supercharging product descriptions and metadata. LLMs can take an image and generate hundreds of accurate attributes to describe it ⏩ Helps consumers find a product faster, and helps retailers sell it. so why is the luxury sector so slow to jump on this train?

What I tell luxury execs who are clueless about AI 👾 ⤵ <<Sharing as deck for easier distrib to your teams. 📩 >> These days I'm talking a lot about AI with C-levels in luxury. 🛍 They know AI is important, but don't know how it will solve their specific problems. Here’s how I see it. 💡 Caveat: only works if the AI solution is done right. ▶ What is the biggest problem in luxury right now, in your view? Hearing varied takes...

Meet our Board! First up, Michele Valadão Levy. 💡 Michele has more than 15 years experience founding and exiting global retail brands. After a career in private equity at Chase Capital Partners, Michele brought Melissa Shoes USA from Brazil to the U.S. With no outside funding, she bootstrapped the company, establishing it as a leading global fashion brand. Michele is also the co-founder and CEO of Costa Brazil, a luxury clean beauty pioneer acquired by Amyris (NASDAQ: AMRS) in 2021. Michele’s track record of delivering profitable growth, winning the U.S. market, and digital transformation is a huge asset for THE LIST as we transform luxury with AI. 🔹

The magic of THE LIST's <GENESYS> API is that it uses AI to solve several problem areas in luxury retail tech. Catalog integration is a big one: ⤵ —— 1. 𝐌𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐝𝐨𝐧'𝐭 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞. ✔ The computer vision LLM of our API reads images in order to classify products and maps it to our marketplace’s category tree structure. It also norms the attributes. So the 18 versions of green in the fashion space are not a problem for us. 🍏 With this approach, the product description can even be in Italian, or have no description at all. Based on an image alone, we can create 120 attribute families for a product. 🖼 To get set up on THE LIST takes days. Other marketplaces require months. 2. 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐝𝐨𝐧’𝐭 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝 𝐚𝐧𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐭 𝐚𝐥𝐥, 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 💆💆♀️ We already have 60+ APIs to common ERP systems, but in case we don’t, our integration team builds the connection to our partner’s ERP system. 3. 𝐎𝐮𝐫 𝐦𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥 𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐮𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐥𝐮𝐱𝐮𝐫𝐲. 🎯 A lot of people ask: why can’t we just install Gemini, OpenAI, Llama or other LLM models and be up and running? The problem is commercial viability. Which can only be achieved with: 🔢 A lot of data to train the models on 🕦 Time — years of tuning and tweaking, as the fashion industry has complex cycles We now have one of the highest accuracy rates in the industry—with 98.9% accuracy we detect, translate and enrich the right product data. How do we know we are not wrong, given such a large number of SKUs? We have multiple models controlling each other, trained on millions of catalog data points. —— Curious about your take on the biggest tech pain points in #luxury. Share them with me below. Watch this space 🤘

💣  Reasons why luxury e-commerce imploded, according to the media: ⤵ - Sector-wide slowdown - High costs - Overspending + poor planning - Off-brand discounts - Brexit ——————————— ⚡ Reasons why *I* think it imploded: 1. Unreasonable integration costs and time for retailers. Retailers should not have to hire a team of data engineers and work 8-12 months to join a marketplace. This forces retailers to only invest in a handful of marketplaces. Big bets can be bad bets. 2. All marketplaces run at extremely high operations overhead because of manual processes. These costs translate into either: ▶ Outrageously high commission structures that force even luxury retailers’ brand margins to their knees, in addition to the constant discounts they are forced into. ▶ Frighteningly low commission structures for the marketplaces in order to stay competitive. Actual costs cause subsidence craters of losses on their balance sheets, so financial market corrections cause ships to sink. 3. Inflexible data architecture and manual processes. The first marketplaces finally put luxury online, but they were too slow to integrate machine learning. ▶ For example: Let’s say each SKU has 15 attributes associated with it: color, season, etc. A retailer wants to add “Seen on TikTok” as an attribute. Simply adding one attribute to the data architecture is a nightmare and often ends up in the “not possible” bin. 4. It costs up to $80 to add each product to a marketplace catalogue. Just too high. ——————————— 🐂  Why I’m still bullish: 1. Online sales are still expected to grow from 20% to 32% of all luxury sales by 2030 (2023 Bain & Company Altagamma Study) 2. If companies can make AI commercially viable and actually work on a large scale, it can solve many of the core issues. ▶ Catalog production, pricing, inventory management, content creation, shipping. There’s no aspect AI can’t support or solve. 3. Luxury is perfect for training AI models. ▶ High seasonality → more variations fed into models → faster learning. We can scan millions of data points to train models to the most commercial viability. 4. After the implosion, there’s now space for new players to innovate and meet retailers where they are. Retailers can try different marketplaces with little to no downside. ——————————— 🌊 TLDR, I see 3 waves of luxury ecomm. 1️⃣ Luxury ecomm 1.0: The tech was not robust enough to withstand a slowdown. 2️⃣ Luxury ecomm 2.0: The next marketplaces stepped away from the inventory risk, but the tech and operating models were still inefficiently designed. 3️⃣ Luxury ecomm 3.0: Belongs to those who can leverage AI across the value chain to stay lean, while developing a winning customer experience across the entire lifecycle. ——————————— 3.0 is our core focus at THE LIST. Watch this space 🤘