Stitch Fix is letting algorithms help design new clothes--and they're allegedly flying off the digital racks

Traditional clothing designers might start the creative process with mood boards and sketches, but Hybrid Designs starts with AI. The in-house brand of subscription fashion startup Stitch Fix, Hybrid Designs employs a data science team that works with the company's order data to predict which clothes customers will want to wear. The team identifies viable gaps in the company's inventory--clothes that people would buy but a designer hasn't made yet, says Stitch Fix chief algorithm officer Eric Colson. "If we could be accurate enough to buy and hold inventory, could we be accurate in what isn't available to buy, what doesn't exist?" "Now when something is ostensibly missing from the market, we fill it in with our own algorithmically generated designs." It works like this: A collection of three algorithms generate a starting point.