IS YOOTOPIA ABOUT TO CHANGE THE WAY WE SHOP ONLINE?

The Australian fashion tech platform wants to take fashion discovery away from the algorithm and put it back in your hands.

Online shopping has somehow become both incredibly easy and incredibly annoying.

Technically, almost everything is available to us. You can find a tiny independent label in Copenhagen, buy a dress from London and have three different versions of the same shoe sitting in tabs from stores on opposite sides of the world before you've even finished your morning coffee. The problem isn't really finding enough fashion anymore.

It's sorting through all of it.

My own shopping habits are proof of this. I'll see something on Instagram, screenshot it, forget where it came from, open another tab, check three retailers, get distracted by something completely unrelated and eventually end up back at one of the same five stores I always shop from anyway.

Then there are the algorithms. They supposedly know exactly what we want, yet somehow manage to show us the same brands, the same products and increasingly, the same version of personal style.

That frustration is part of what Australian founders Eri Stewart and Lucy Hosken are trying to solve with Yootopia, a new AI powered fashion discovery platform currently preparing to launch. Their premise is less about giving an algorithm even more control over what you buy and more about allowing you to build your own fashion universe in the first place.

Too Much Fashion, Not Enough Discovery

For years, online shopping has been built around recommendation.

You buy a black blazer, so a retailer shows you another black blazer. You click on a pair of ballet flats, so suddenly every ad you see for the next fortnight contains ballet flats. It's technically personalisation, but it can also make shopping feel repetitive.

Yootopia is approaching the problem from another direction. Rather than beginning with an algorithm deciding which fashion universe you belong in, users choose the brands they want inside their own store and discovery happens from within that self curated world. AI still has a role, but the starting point is your taste rather than an opaque recommendation engine trying to predict it.

It's an interesting idea because the internet was supposed to make fashion discovery limitless. Instead, what we actually see is increasingly influenced by sponsored placement, advertising budgets and whatever a platform has decided is likely to keep us clicking.

It creates a funny question around trends too. If we've all been repeatedly served the same shoe for six months, did we collectively decide we loved it, or did we eventually love it because we couldn't escape it?

Yootopia wants to give shoppers more control over that process.

The Women Behind It Have Been Here Before

The founders aren't arriving at this problem without experience.

Eri Stewart previously built Hard to Find, a marketplace based around discovering products from independent brands and retailers. Her own explanation of the shift between that business and Yootopia is interesting: when Hard to Find was built, access was the problem. Great products existed, but actually finding them online was difficult.

Now we have the opposite problem.

There are more brands, more products, more creators and more recommendations than anyone could realistically process. AI is only going to increase that volume. What we're missing isn't necessarily another place containing more things to buy, it's a better way of organising the things we might actually care about.

Lucy Hosken comes to Yootopia after two decades working across fashion, culture, media and entrepreneurship, and has similarly been thinking about what has been lost as fashion discovery moved online. Together, the founders describe Yootopia as the intersection of their experience across fashion, media, ecommerce and technology.

That fashion background matters. There are plenty of technology companies interested in making shopping faster, but fashion isn't purely an efficiency problem. Half the enjoyment is finding something you weren't specifically searching for.

Think Spotify, But Make It Fashion

The easiest way the founders have described Yootopia is “Spotify, but for fashion”, and while every new tech platform seems to want to be the Spotify of something, in this case the comparison actually makes some sense.

Spotify didn't invent music and Yootopia isn't trying to create more fashion. The proposition is about organising an enormous existing catalogue around an individual person.

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The difference from a traditional online department store is that there isn't meant to be one definitive Yootopia storefront that every customer enters. You construct your own by choosing the brands you want to surround yourself with, then use that environment to browse and discover.

For smaller independent labels, there's another potentially interesting part to the model. Yootopia says brands won't be charged CPCs, commissions or placement fees, and transactions happen on the brand's own website rather than Yootopia taking ownership of the customer relationship.

If it works as intended, that could give smaller brands another route to discovery without requiring them to outspend much larger competitors simply to appear in front of shoppers.

Do We Actually Want AI to Dress Us?

This is probably the question I find most interesting about Yootopia.

Fashion tech is moving very quickly towards AI doing more on our behalf: predicting what we'll like, styling outfits, narrowing our options and eventually making purchasing decisions for us.

There are obvious conveniences there, but I'm not convinced the ultimate goal of fashion should be removing all the work.

Sometimes the best thing you buy is the thing you weren't looking for. Personal style develops partly because you make strange choices, change your mind, become obsessed with something unexpected or stumble across a brand that doesn't neatly match everything you've bought before.

Yootopia's founders appear conscious of that tension. Their argument is that AI should help organise discovery rather than replace the human act of choosing. Users establish the brands and aesthetic world they want to explore, while the technology helps navigate what sits inside it.

That's a considerably more appealing version of AI shopping to me than opening an app and being told, we've calculated your personality and selected these trousers.

Whether Yootopia can actually preserve the messy pleasure of fashion discovery while making the experience more useful will become clearer once people are properly using it. The platform is still in its launch phase, so there's a difference between an interesting premise and knowing how it feels to shop through every day.

But the problem it's trying to solve is very real.

We don't need more access to fashion. We have almost infinite access already. What we could probably use is a better way to find the parts of it that actually feel like us.

And if Yootopia can do that without turning everyone into another version of the same algorithmically approved shopper, I'll be very interested to see where it goes.

With love (and frankness),

Bea x