For anyone that's experienced that pain of seeing the perfect handbag or dress on screen, perhaps or on a sartorially-flawless subway commuter, worry not: the days of glimpsing the perfect accessory - and having not the slightest clue where to procure it - could be over.
Enter ASAP54. The app, designed by former Farfetch COO Daniela Cecílio and lauded by the likes of heavy-browed It girl Cara Delevingne, is here to save the day. Inspired by her own experiences of trawling the endless online ether to identify that exact pair of Chanel shades, Cecílio took matters into her own hands: the creation of ASAP54, an app that uses images - rather than tangled strings of keywords and SEO search terms - to isolate that elusive, have-to-have item. Simply take a photo of your desired item, crop it if necessary, and ASAP54 will bring up the item or its closest match. If neither option is quite right, ASAP54 can crowdsource responses from other users. It also has staffers that will personally sift through the wheat and the chaff of Internet search results to ensure a satisfactory outcome, providing the user with five additional options.
"I get inspired by Instagram, fashion blogs, [but] most of them don't give you enough information," said Cecílio, in an interview with Business of Fashion. "It was always very hard because you would Google, and Google would come up with the worst results. Nothing compared with what you were searching for. I use Polyvore, I use Shopstyle, but no one is focusing on something proper for the fashion industry."
If you build it, they will come, the logic goes, and for fashionistas like Cecílio, the need for such a service was self-evident. With online customers preferring to take their business to multiple channels and across multiple platforms, ASAP52 essentially unifies all the potential sources, creating a pool of clothes and accessories that she hopes will ultimately become a 'Google' for the fashion industry. "I really believe that omni-channel is the future and people will be taking pictures offline and shopping online, and taking pictures online and shopping offline," Cecílio says. "There isn't really a search engine or social application that has cracked that, so I think my aim is to solve that problem. It's to bridge the gap between what you see and what you shop," she continued.
Cecílio and her team have built technology specifically for ASAP54, searching for holes when the existing technology couldn't deliver a sound visual breakdown of the submitted images, and then designing the program to rectify those issues. Looking at color, texture, and product category (among other criteria), ASAP54 is designed to be as thorough as possible. The fact that it's mobile is also a crucial point for the team, with venture capitalist Richard Chen of Beijing's Ceyuan Ventures positive about the app's future in the Chinese market. "The future of technology is mobile, not PC," he said. "More and more Chinese are shopping online. However, to search these fashion items on mobile is a nightmare. We do not have the graphic search technology like the one ASAP54 has. We believe [the combination of] ASAP54 and China's 600 million mobile users (still growing) will create endless possibility."
ASAP54 is guaranteeing a response rate of 24 hours, and to fulfill its promise, is in the process of partnering with US and UK fashion schools and personal shoppers. In the same countries, ASAP54 will also have retail partners, thus ensuring more throughout lists of the products available to shoppers. At the moment, there's around 150 retail partners, including big guns Net-a-Porter, Barneys, J. Crew, Neiman Marcus, Topshop, and Forever 21 - traversing high and low fashion with the tap of a finger. ASAP54 was launched Friday in the US, Europe and Brazil, but Cecílio's endgame is to see ASAP54 go global, and promote small local brands internationally.
