Gen Z cares more about what their favourite celebrities and creators are wearing than any one brand. This is the premise of new AI-powered fashion search platform OneOff, founded by Emir Talu and Bobby Maylack.
“Younger millennials, Gen Z, have Instagram as a default app and are using algorithms to find whatever clothes they’re searching for,” says Talu, who is a first investor in Sourced By (another AI-powered fashion platform tied to trending Instagram products). “Online discovery is becoming the biggest inspiration source for fashion.”
OneOff’s initial premise is simple: go on the website; answer the prompt question of ‘Who are you wearing?’ with the creator whose outfits you want to emulate; and choose from a selection of AI-generated products based on this creator’s style. Items are sometimes exact, sometimes ‘inspired by’ what these high-profile creators are wearing. A search for Addison Rae brings up $262 red Repetto pumps and a polka dot Dolce Gabbana bustier top ($995). Want to dress like Hailey Bieber? Try a Wardrobe.NYC blazer dress ($2,500) or a pair of $470 Saint Laurent cat-eye sunglasses. Items are majority luxury, with some sub-$100 basics thrown in. The idea is to stay true to what creators are actually wearing, Talu says. Higher-ticket items also mean higher commission.
The grip celebrity style has on consumers is clear. Celebrity outfit accounts have followings in the hundreds of thousands, and modern fashion magazines have built business models around sharing celebrity outfit finds. Bottega Veneta knew that fans of A$AP Rocky and Kendall Jenner (both of whom are in OneOff’s initial crop of creators) would be all over their full-look Bottega guerrilla paparazzi photos, weeks before the images were re-released as an official brand campaign.
Ninety-one per cent of Gen Z shoppers look to creators for the latest trends, according to a recent LTK report. Fifty-one per cent say that social media influencers set these trends; 21 say the same for celebrities, per a recent Vogue Business survey. (Of course, these days, stars like Hailey Bieber double as both.)
Talu says that the process of shopping for what you see on Instagram is still broken. Instagram Shop came and went, meaning the only way to shop through the app directly is via advertisements. Affiliate links, managed by companies like LTK and ShopMy, give users a chance to shop links in bios, generating income for creators, but the setup and linking process can be clunky. And, when you see a stray street style shot while scrolling your Instagram feed, rarely do you know where to buy the pieces.
This is where OneOff comes in. Initially, Talu searched for a company that was bridging the gap to invest in. But they couldn’t find it. Instead, he and Maylack recruited a team of executives who have worked across the fashion and creator commerce spaces (including The Frankie Shop, Reformation, Glossier, Cameo and Live Nation) to launch their own solution.
The company raised initial funds earlier this year, onboarding investors including Pentas Ventures (Talu’s venture fund), the Hermès family office, Rob Lowe, Matt George (co-owner of Stussy and former CEO of Yeezy), Elliot Tebele (founder of Jerry Media), Lee Linden (founder of Quiet Capital) and Peter Muzzonigro (CEO of Dysrupt).
“There’s been a shift in how people discover what to buy in fashion over the past few years, we think OneOff and its team is well equipped to address the needs of today’s luxury fashion shoppers,” the Hermès Lowe Family Offices (which often co-invest) said in a joint statement.
Launching in beta mode today, OneOff is pre-populated with about 100 creators, including Bieber, Bella Hadid and Sofia Richie Grainge, as well as stylist Dani Michelle and Unwell’s Alex Cooper, whose style users can search for. The team selected these creators by identifying the most searched-for celebrity style (via top-ranking Google data pulled for ‘X creator name – style’). Moving forward, new creators will be added each week, informed by user searches.
Those who are verified can earn affiliate revenue off the bat. “When we talk to any talent, they’re aware that every day, someone is searching for their name plus fashion; plus sweater; plus style; plus whatever,” Maylack says. “There’s this pervasive feeling with talent that they’re not monetising their actual trendsetting — other people are.” (The current revenue split on a sale is 10 to 25 per cent from the retailer to OneOff, which is split with the creator.)
For now, the platform is partnering with multibrand retailers including Ssense, Mytheresa, Net-a-Porter, Moda Operandi and Revolve. As usership grows, the plan is to monitor the brands that perform well via these sites to eventually bring brands directly into the fold as well.
At launch, OneOff is essentially a gamified fashion-cum-celebrity search engine. What’s playful now will, down the line, eliminate the need to search at all. Once OneOff knows you well, the plan is to feed users weekly recommendations — based on the creator style they’ve indicated they’re keen to emulate — for them to buy.
“We want to do what Netflix did for finding what to watch,” Talu says. “It gives you a personalised home feed. Yours looks different than mine. We want to do the same thing in fashion, where the algorithm pick becomes so good that you don’t have to go out and look for anything manually.”
This is, of course, where some users will grow dubious. Recall 2024’s dominating fashion quandary, where discussions about the impact of ‘the algorithm’ on personal style wound up almost as flattened as style (purportedly was) itself. But Talu is confident that OneOff’s grounding in real people’s style — and the very human desire to take inspiration from said style — will prevent said flattening.
“AI is a great enabler, but you need to have a very clear use case for it, and it needs to tie back to some sort of a traditional way of shopping,” Talu says. “For us, that traditional way of shopping is people idolising other people’s style. We’re using AI to make that easier.”
The merits and limitations of AI’s ability to gauge and recommend that which is stylish and in fashion have been hotly debated. This isn’t lost on the OneOff founders — it’s also, in part, why they opted for an AI “agent” that taps into existing large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, over building its own from scratch. “There’s a taste element and a style element that you can’t really expect AI to capture very accurately,” Talu concedes. That’s why OneOff built the AI agent to go out to existing models, bring back the results — for a last step of human touch. Before a product goes live on a OneOff search, a team member has to approve it. “I would say 90 per cent of the time [the AI] does a really good job,” Talu says. The human stamp of approval is there to mitigate that last 10 per cent.
A new type of affiliate model
Talu calls the celebrity angle of OneOff its “retention superpower”. “It’s the reason why people [will] come back,” he says. “When people decide they want to dress like someone, they follow that person, they follow them on Instagram, they’re highly engaged in what they’re wearing.”
The additional layer to OneOff is that creators can get ‘verified’, giving creators less inclined to set up affiliate programmes a way to profit from the items they’re photographed in. OneOff is launching with a suite of verified creators including Suki Waterhouse, Emma Roberts and Winnie Harlow. These creators have the option of signing off on the AI results themselves (versus a OneOff team member doing so) and can make suggestions to feed back into it, too.
Affiliate marketing is big business. Creator earnings from affiliate links were expected to surpass $1 billion in 2024, up 23 per cent year-on-year. But it also takes time to set up an account on ShopMy or an Amazon storefront. It takes time to continually update these storefronts with items as you wear them. And it takes time to post about them. Time is the one thing top talent doesn’t have, says Maylack, who has worked in the creator economy industry for 10 years. “The number one thing I’ve learned is that the thing that you’re competing with for talent isn’t direct competition [like other AI styling platforms],” he says. “What you’re competing with is time.”
This is where affiliate marketing is missing the top of the funnel, Maylack says. “The creator economy has done an amazing job of building a market for 99 per cent of creators,” he says. “But the largest celebrities are never going to sit there and manage an affiliate storefront. They’re never going to feel comfortable posting ‘buy my jeans on this link’ next to them promoting a movie. There’s this brand and time disconnect.” This disconnect is big business — as these creators account for the bulk of what people want to buy. That is, if they can afford it.
If high-profile creators won’t bother with traditional affiliate links, why is OneOff worth it? It’s the lowest possible lift, the founders say. “We’ve built something that’s truly passive revenue,” Maylack says. Plus, where the usual ‘link in bio’ or ‘link on stories’ approach feels clunky and less polished (and again, takes time), with OneOff, creators don’t need to promote it to profit. Though, of course, a post or two is sure to boost their earnings.
Beyond the search
For now, the gamified search engine is relatively limited in its use cases as the team tests consumer behaviour and plans to raise another funding round in June. “For now, we just want people to get familiar with the product, engage in a really simple way,” Talu says.
Post-June funding round, the plan is to scale OneOff beyond a gamified search platform using these insights to inform which new creators to bring on board; which brands to partner with; what built-out features would generate the highest traction. Right now, there are approximately 30 items per creator. This will grow. The option to refine search by price and product category are on the cards, too.
Then comes the personalisation. The end goal — or OneOff 2.0 — is for users not to have to search for what they want to wear anymore. OneOff will know that they like the style of Hailey Bieber, Sofia Richie Grainge, with a little Kaia Gerber thrown in, and recommend products accordingly. This AI stylist will boost retention and engagement; generate more affiliate revenue; and encourage more creators to get on board, is the hope.
But this stage will come later, Talu is keen to emphasise. He acknowledges that it’s early days for both OneOff and AI tech — which is why humans need to stay in the loop. “I don’t think we’ll ever completely rely on AI to introduce a new person’s style, but after a couple of successful results that we’ve intervened with, then we can go more in the backseat, let the AI take over,” he says. “But you have to have AI on the leash for the initial phase.”
Clarification: Updated to reflect that Suki Waterhouse, Emma Roberts and Winnie Harlow are the verified creators.
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