Capsules, a new ‘Shazam’ app for fashion, could change the way you shop

But Capsule’s goal is more ambitious and far-reaching: it aims to become the default destination for online shopping. Rather than relying on its own inventory or partnerships with other brands, the company collects data from about 20,000 websites every night, ingests it and uses it to power its product index.

Capsule co-founder and CEO Michele Van Ruiten told Business Insider that they plan on women’s fashion, aiming to own the space within two to a half years. Its ultimate goal is “to create a universal horizontal commerce data layer that exists on top of the Internet,” Van Ruiten said. “This data layer understands products, every product that can be bought globally, what it is, who sells it, what it’s made of, and its resale value.”

So consumers will no longer need to perform laborious online searches for a specific pair of heels or a bottle of water. “One search takes everything online into account,” Van Ruiten said.

Take a picture, buy the dress

In practice, Capsule works a bit like a reverse google image search on hyperdrive. Users simply take a picture of a product – whether it’s an actor wearing a dress they like or a pair of shoes they saw in a store window – and upload it to the app and it will show them the item, along with other similar shopping styles.

The company uses computer vision models to infer details about items in its catalog, compare products with each other, and link identical items.

Beyond image search, Capsule can also recommend a personalized color wheel for users based on skin, eye and hair using proprietary algorithms. It also allows users to augment their searches with generative AI. So if they upload a picture of a white shirt, but want to see it in colors not offered by the brand that makes the shirt, Capsule uses generative AI to recreate it in new colors, allowing users to search for options from other brands.

Last month, Capsule also launched a new text search feature in beta that lets users search for clothes based on a concept they have in mind — whether it’s just “a simple white t-shirt ” or “Carrie Bradshaw inspired dress” – rather than a specific image.

Finally, Capsule plans to share data about what users are looking for or how they improve products with brands to drive new product designs. It will need to build up a few million more users before then, but Van Ruiten said the company is already able to forecast trends before they reach apps like Pinterest or are picked up by fashion magazines like Vogue.

It paves the way for a new way of shopping that is driven by the consumer.

Consumers are moving away from “wanting to replicate the things they see online in a one-to-one way,” Van Ruiten said. Casual Gen Z shoppers, in particular, find fashion inspiration in tons of places in the virtual world—from brands to influencers to viral trends. So they’re starting to see apps like Capsule as a place “where their own creativity could put them at the helm of product discovery,” she said.