Dressing probably is the simplest thing we face every day. Just put a piece of cloth to cover your body, how difficult could be? But we are not living in Ancient Greece. In modern times, decent dressing needs to pay attention to color matching, meet the occasion, and consider the weather and fashion trends.
That is why we created Dressrious, an AI-powered outfit suggestion app specially designed for those who don’t want to spend time on dressing up but still want to dress decently. You can download it on App Store for free.
Who Are We
We are a startup in Beijing, officially founded on 13 June, 2023. Yes, less than one month, and when we say “we”, we actually mean “me”, since we only have one employee, that’s myself. Dressrious is my first app built from a concept. I have no serious programming experience before.
This concept was formed during the Qingming holiday three months ago. When I returned from Beijing to my hometown Wuhan to tidy up my old clothes, I felt that these clothes from my school days are still in good condition and I can continue to wear them, but I didn’t know how to match them with my current clothes.
I think there must be an app that can solve this problem. Take photos of all your clothes and import them into the app, and this app will recommend matching solutions. Indeed, there are already many such applications on App Store, but none of them can satisfy me.
They are either over-functioning and complex in UI, or mainly based on e-commerce and community, and need an account to log in to use. However, I just want a simple tool that can tell me how to match my clothes.
Therefore, I decided to develop one by myself.
Can I Really Build An AI App Alone
YES. Although I have no serious development experience, I have worked as a product manager in technology companies for many years. I am familiar with the current technical tools in the field of artificial intelligence, and I am good at learning and searching for information.
As soon as I returned to Beijing, I began to take action. First, I need to learn Swift, SwiftUI, and machine learning. I read many books on those topics from O’Reilly, my subscription is finally useful.
I learned while doing it. In less than two weeks, a prototype came out. The next step was to train the model for image recognition. This work was a little boring. So I had only trained a small part of it and planned to complete the whole training after finishing all the development work.
Then, thanks to the GitHub community, I added Ezaldeen99’s background removal package and Boris-Em’s ColorKit to my project, to deal with background removal features and color-related functions, sincerely thank them. At the beginning of May, I completed the main functions of the first version.
Everything was going well. For most of May, I was training models and optimizing outfit suggestion algorithms. Those were not easy and enjoyable work.
In June, I felt more confident in this project, so I bought the domain name, built an official website, and founded the company. After several rounds of testing and optimization, on 5 July 2023, Dressrious finally launched on App Store.
What’s Next
I made it. I built an AI app and founded a company in three months. What comes next, should be the real challenge, how to run this app and the company.
Of course, first of all, I need customers. So, I hope that friends who are reading this article, please do not hesitate to download Dressrious and experience it. Any feedback is welcome.
Secondly, I need several engineers to scale this project with me. My vision is not limited to outfit suggestions. The goal of Dressrious is to help everyone dress in glorious. If you are interested in artificial intelligence for the fashion industry, feel free to contact me. My email is markgloom@outlook.com. We can plan the follow-up work together, make a business plan, and seek funds. Who knows, maybe suddenly, we become the next big thing.