Reimagining the E-Commerce User Experience: Behind Our Investment in Lalaland.ai

Our investment in Lalaland is now official! In this short piece, we’ll share why we’re so excited to partner up with Michael, Ugnius & the rest of the Lalaland team. Before we deep-dive into our reasoning, a short recap on the hottest photorealistic-model-generation startup in the Netherlands:

• Lalaland makes humans! Full human body generation, head-to-toe.
• Their AI solution offers a large and diverse library of size, age and ethnic-inclusive models to fashion brands, thereby enabling websites to tailor display models to different customer segments.
• Their eventual goal is to help brands minimize operational costs and, in the long run, reduce returns and changes, as consumers can use Lalaland’s technology to visualise their desired fashion items on personalized models.
• Lalaland went through two incubator programs: UtrechtInc in the Summer of 2019 and most recently, ACE Incubator, our close friends and partners from the Startup Village.

The Team that Made it Happen

If you read our previous “Behind Our Investment” article on Bringly, you’d recall our excessive attention on finding stellar, driven and talented students and recent graduate founders. We first met Michael at Startup Village, our home turf, where Lalaland is also based. After Dyme, Lalaland marks our second investment in our neighbors, which is probably just us subconsciously emulating Sequoia given that they’ve been a strong advocate of backing startups that are geographically close (slightly less valuable in the midst of a pandemic though).

Michael participated in our Christmas P!TCH event, Amsterdam’s largest recurring pitch competition exclusively for student and recent graduate founders, where Lalaland was awarded the second place prize. Our team was extremely impressed and enthusiastic about Michael’s character and passion, hence our decision to take things further with several follow up meetings, culminating in our investment.

Other than their drive and motivation, Lalaland’s founders are highly talented technical developers. Michael has a background in Computer Science from the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam while Ugnius obtained his BSc in Business Analytics and Data Science from the same institution. Their strong yet diverse technical background allows them to focus on different aspects of Lalaland’s solution. Their current product offering is a perfect testimonial to what the duo can achieve.

Lalaland’s team goes beyond Michael and Ugnius though. After a few months at UtrechtInc, they had attracted the attention of various experienced tech entrepreneurs and business developers and they were able to successfully bring one of them onboard to lead their commercial efforts. Their hiring served as a strong testimony to the quality of Lalaland’s solution and the great work they were doing early on. To add to that, they were also able to onboard five part-time members to help them both with product development, sales and marketing, all of this while participating in the ACE Incubator program. Having such a passionate, driven and talented team helping build out the future of e-commerce experience was something that really impressed us and validated the strong entrepreneurial capabilities Michael and Ugnius share.

LaLaLand Models

This is where things get even more interesting. Michael and Ugnius had previously worked together on using neural networks for various cases. The ultimate solution for them was generating images with neural networks. After a few pivots, further highlighting their entrepreneurial flair, they doubled down on solving the problem we are faced with when online shopping, namely: the models we see are not a good representation of who we are, how the clothes fit and how they change based on our size, skin tone, age etc. This is where their product comes in: Lalaland generates and hyper-personalizes full human body models. By doing so, they enable the brands and online retailers to allow users to have a tailored experience based on their size features and preferences. The ultimate goal is to have people input their sizes online and have an AI-generated model with these features wearing the item they seek to purchase, effectively allowing users to see how it would look on them.

This solution benefits both consumers and businesses alike. Consumers will be able to have a fully tailored and personalized experience while shopping online while business will be able to save greatly on production and photoshoot costs, increase average basket value and greatly reduce the cost of returns over the long run. While the current solution is focused on allowing skin tone personalization, they will soon be able to tailor for size and age, thereby being fully inclusive from a demographic perspective. With our help, alongside future support from investors and brands, Lalaland will be able to offer a fully customizable experience to brands and their customers.

Everyone wants a trip to LaLaLand

Beyond playing in the fast growing and enormous market of e-commerce, there are various trends that play in favour of Lalaland’s services. Firstly, incredible increase in adoption by full-stack ecommerce platforms like Shopify and Magento, open up the untapped market of smaller and harder to reach retailers. Once Lalaland’s APIs are completed, users will be able to integrate their models from their Shopify and Magento account. Lalaland will thus be able to reach the 1M+ active on Shopify alone.

Another key aspect we considered, especially when discussing with industry experts, is the increased focus on online user experience. Global brands seek to offer the absolute best offline retail experience to their customers in their brick and mortar stores, yet translating that to their online stores is much harder. Lalaland perfectly fills that gap, at least from a personalization perspective. By allowing users to tailor their viewing experience and engage more on the item page, brands will be able to offer a level of “personal care” to the shopper similar to that present in their stores. Lalaland is effectively bringing offline retail experience on the internet, while saving costs and improving margins for the businesses involved.

The current lockdown period perfectly showcases this: with stores forced to close down, a better online customer experience is key in driving revenue and returning users. How to do that? Well, by having fully customizable and inclusive auto generated models, of course! We strongly believe navigating these trends will allow Lalaland to grow fast, while positively impacting businesses and customers at the same time.

ASIF x LaLaLand

From Michael’s first pitch at our event back in December, to numerous coffees at the Coffee Virus @ Startup Village, we have been greatly impressed by Lalaland’s driven and talented team. The network they have surrounded themselves with has allowed them to gain unique insights from experienced entrepreneurs and investors alike, which was vital in their product finalization. We’re excited to partner up with Michael and Ugnius and cannot wait to disrupt the e-commerce industry together.

Have a startup and want an investment from ASIF Ventures? Send an email to sid@asif.ventures and he’ll get back to you!