There are two types of shoppers in the world: those who enjoy the many options of the department store experience, and those who prefer the personalized attention of a local boutique. The Yes, an AI-powered shopping platform from Julie Bornstein, the former COO of Stitch Fix, offers you the best qualities of both.
And as of today, you can finally start shopping on it.
With most of our favorite stores, big and small, closed due to COVID-19, we’re all on the lookout for new ways to shop. That’s where this new tech-backed platform, that has been several years in the making, comes in. Like your favorite neighborhood boutique, The Yes tailors your shopping experience to your individual aesthetic. Upon signing onto the app, you’ll be asked a round of questions, from what your favorite designers are to which silhouettes, lengths, and patterns you’re more likely to purchase and everything in between. After inserting your specific sizes for a number of well-known brands, The Yes’s AI technology crafts a store just for you. No one — not even your roommate, sister, best friend, or whoever you share everything with — will have the same selection as you.
At the same time, The Yes also provides the kind of range we’ve come to expect from department stores and e-tailers like Nordstrom and Net-A-Porter, but without the incessant scrolling and filtering. “People don’t want to work to find what they want,” says Lisa Green, senior vice president of brand partnerships at The Yes. “They want their ‘stores’ to understand their preferences and help them get to the perfect item for them without having to sift through mountains of results.”
The team at The Yes has worked for the last two years to ensure that you don’t have to scour any longer. “The more you use the app, the better and smarter it gets,” says Green. It’s true, the more items you click “Yes” to, the more personalized the experience becomes every time you log in. Upon scrolling through your store each day, you’ll be presented with a slew of shoppable options, which you can either hit “Yes” or “No” for. Clicking “Yes” doesn’t mean you have to buy them, per se, but just that you’re interested in seeing them or similar styles in the future. It’s like having a personal shopper looking over your shoulder, recording what you grimaced at and what caught your eye.
Using the company’s patent-pending price-match technology, The Yes will also find you the cheapest price for every item, cutting out the need for you to scour page after page on Google for deals on obscure websites. Even better, you’ll never have to deal with missing out on a sale item again, because, once you’ve said “Yes” to an item, the app will notify you if it goes on sale. You also get the added benefit of seeing items in the exact way a brand intended them to be seen by consumers, with all photos on The Yes coming straight from the brand’s websites.
As for the almost 150 brands currently on board, the selection is far-reaching. “Taylor Tomasi Hill — The Yes’s creative and fashion director — and I worked closely to refine the list of brands to ensure that we launched with an assortment of fashion-forward brands from luxury to DTC to cool new brands that represent price points from high to low,” Green says. “Our lens is fashion, our price point is democratic.” From plain white t-shirts to designer handbags, the brands range from Gucci, Balenciaga, and Acne Studios to Zara, Aritzia, and Madewell. “We offer brands a unique way to be discovered by new customers, or re-discovered by lapsed customers,” Green says. “Brands are most excited about being part of a new way of shopping.”
It’s an easy shopping experience, with the added benefit of being a community-like platform where you can share what you’re shopping (or hoping to be gifted) with friends and family. Right now, the company is also donating $1 for every download to the Good+Foundation, an organization that supports families in New York and L.A. facing hunger, poverty, and unstable housing.
Since our stores on The Yes are wholly different than yours, though, we suggest signing up and exploring the app for yourself. If your curation is anything like ours, we’re betting big that you’ll be saying yes to a new way of shopping in no time.