Oh, the holidays. Consumerism is at its peak, spam is out of control, and my Amazon Prime purchases won’t be delivered until December 28th. Tell my nieces and nephews that Auntie Julie is terrible at Christmas. Now I have to actually go to a store.

As a girl who lives in the South End of Boston and hasn’t driven a car in 13 years, let’s just say 98% of my purchases are on-line. That is unless I end up wandering Target with my parents on a random Saturday night. Shh… that recently happened and I’m still in recovery. Oh and don’t even say the words “Olive Garden” to me. #gag

Let’s get back to the point at hand. Machine Learning in Fashion.

I have a first date shirt. Ladies, am I right? We all have a first date “outfit”. It still fits if I gain or lose a few, can be worn with jeans or a skirt, and I always feel pretty. If this shirt were to ever get lost, my next option is the nunnery.

So the problem with said shirt, is that I only have one. I’ve googled “black sleeveless v-neck a-line women’s shirt” enough times and I still can’t for the life of me find a replica. I can hear the tiny violin queuing up.

Look at the image at the top of this post. Go on, scroll up. indico has built a “Clothing Similarity” tool that solves my first date shirt problem. See that dress in black and white? Here it is in black and aqua. Or is it #blueandgold… thank god that “controversy” only lasted a few days.

I like that Amazon can give me vague recommendations but I’ve actually never bought anything they offer. Let me find the shirt by uploading an image of my it. Let me go to Macy’s, Polyvore, The Hunt, or White House Black Market (where I got the damn shirt from) and see the shirts related to what I want. Why is this so hard?

The indico models are trained to do exactly this. I tell it what I want and the model spits out what I actually want to buy.

If you’re a fashion retailer, do you upload each item and tag “sleeveless” “black” “v-neck” “a-line” “women’s” each time? I really hope not. That sounds like a bitch to do. Beyond recommending clothing to your shoppers, we’ll tag all of that stuff under the hood. Because we can, we like to, and we’re good at it.

Want more info? julie@indico.io still works, even though you guys never talk to me. Go play with the demo on our home page now. You’ll like it, I promise.