Introduction

My name is Diara Bousso, and I'm the founder of Diara Blue, which is a fashion brand.

I've never taken a fashion class in my life, so setting the expectations very low.

And I'm gonna start with just sharing with you some data, because that's gonna set the stone for what I wanna talk about today.

Understanding Sustainability in Fashion

My brand is described as sustainable. I never heard that word before, starting my company, and it became something that people assigned to my work for this reason.

1So a typical fashion company is basically, this is not correct.

Challenges in the Traditional Fashion Industry

A typical fashion company starts designing and takes a lot of time to understand if they are right or wrong. My company's goal is to find out I'm wrong faster than everyone else so I can move to the next thing.

So a typical company would do trend research and textile design, maybe two weeks. And this is me being conservative. It takes longer.

But you're ordering fabric samples. You're dealing with a factory probably somewhere in Asia.

That's going to be three weeks. You do your silhouette design.

So you want to make these pants. You're going to sketch it. Then you have to make a sample order.

You have to make a tech pack, send it to the factory. They make it. They send it to you. That takes six weeks.

The Inefficiencies of Traditional Fashion Processes

You're going to fit it on a model in person.

It won't fit.

You're going to do this whole thing again. Let's say you're going to lose another four weeks.

And then you do a photo shoot and retouch the images. That's two weeks, if you're lucky. And then you make a lookbook or a digital something on your website about a week.

And then you go to a trade show or somewhere. You sell the collection. The buyers, Nordstrom, Bloomingdale's, all of them come. You convince them to order something. And then six months later, you deliver to their stores.

So you basically wasted five months.

guessing things and trying to sell them. But you actually will not know if it's going to sell until six months from there. So you waste its five months in development, and then six months later, it's going to go live in the market. And then you realize you are all wrong.

All right.

Innovation Through Disruption

So this industry, due to this waste, 85% of garments end up in a landfill. And it's one of the most polluting industries in the world.

Growing With a Non-Traditional Approach

What I did, because I didn't study anything, I didn't know the rules. So I just kind of broke them all the time without knowing.

I came from math, and I was at Stanford.

I took design thinking.

And Jeremy was making me go on the street and selling things and just giving him answers of what people are saying. So I would design something. I'd take it down to Oakland. And I'd come back to him, and I'd be like, oh, people are buying it. He's like, good. What happened when you sell it in San Francisco? OK, nobody's buying it. OK, your customer is in Oakland. Go back to Oakland next weekend and do more. And we're doing this every week. So he kind of brainwashed me into this iterative way of thinking and just asking people what they want.

So that became my company. I registered it after I finished his class. And that was the beginning, 2018.

Leveraging Technology and Social Media

So what we do is that we don't do trend research or textile design.

I'm in constant communication with my customer. I'm very active on social media.

Social Media as a Trend Research Tool

And I'm taking selfies, showing my outfits, my friends' outfits, whatever I'm thinking is out there. And people are constantly interacting with my work, whether it's Instagram stories, comments, whatever. And that's data. That's my trend research. And it's going on every single day.

So I take all of that information. And in the past, I would try to make sense of it, and it would take me days. Now with AI, I can get my answer in a minute and just plug it into a model, and I'll show you how I do it.

And then all of these things in green, I do them in a few minutes. And I'm going to show you how I do that. So all of these five months of research, I do it in a few minutes.

And within the next day, I put it back online, and people have them vote or even order something. Yesterday, a buyer for a big retailer texted me, e-mailed me and was like, oh, this dress is doing very well.

Do you have it for fall? I was like, I kind of forgot to design a fall collection because I was burned out. So not really, but give me a sec.

And within 30 minutes, I created a few images. mean I asked her I was like oh my god what are your favorite colors what's trending right now and like chit-chatting a little bit and she gave I understood she liked Navy so within 30 minutes I created some images and I secured a $10,000 order without doing any of this so

i just got the po today as i was coming here so i'm really happy but that's kind of what i do for a living and i really love it because it's so much fun and um then the next part is the bulk production and delivery that takes on average 8 to 12 weeks in a factory we do this in seven days so you'll go on our website you'll buy a dress and in seven days you'll get it in front of your doorstep it's made to order

Because all the time I'm taking these polls and getting your insight as to what you like, I'm printing fabric in those colors that you like. And then when you order something, then I assemble it. So in a way, I'm running a restaurant and I buy all these ingredients you like, but I only assemble the meal, your garment, when you actually pay me.

So nothing gets done unless I know that you want it. And I don't really have a supply chain. I have a demand chain.

AI in Fashion Design

And that's the whole work that AI is making easier. So I will work you through it.

This is what I do constantly on social media. These are screenshots from my stories on Instagram. And I'm constantly asking people questions. Of course, in between, I'm showing them my food and my travels and random things to get them excited. And then I just randomly drop a question in there. So they're always giving me information.

And I take that information. For example, I know they like green. I know they like we did these geometric blueprints, and they hated it. So I know not to do that and not wait six months. I know they like when prints are placed at the bottom. We got 87% response. And I think we had 4,000 people vote here in stories.

And I come from math. Before AI, this is what I used to do, and this is what I was studying back in school. I was a math teacher, and I was using the math I was teaching to students to create shapes. I was doing geometric graphs and patterns, and then I would apply them on different bodies and ethnicities, and then I would screenshot it and put it on stories.

That process was already very fast. It would make six months of work happen maybe in a week, Now I get that process happen in minutes, so even faster because of AI.

So this is an example of my old way, and I'm still doing it because I love math, but I hope the video will play. Let's see. So yeah, I was teaching stuff about polar coordinates, and I'm graphing all these equations, and then I built an app where I could put them quickly on my avatars and show it in my room, in my paintings, in my dresses, and then just screenshot and see if people like something. I would end up with stuff like this.

These are like 2D sketches that any designer can produce in Photoshop, or you can do it by hand, or with AI you can get it even faster. But this used to be my old way, and I already thought I was crushing it like this. And now I'm going from this to this.

So I took that dress from the previous slide, the first one you see over here. And I get to show it on a model of different ethnicities. And I know exactly who these ethnicities are because I'm constantly asking my customer.

My favorite question in stories is I put a question box and I'm like, tell me about yourself. Who are you? People love that.

I'm a mom based in Maryland. I have two kids.

And they give you all of their information because they love to be heard. So based on this, I can understand the different profiles and demographics.

And when I now create these clothes with AI, I can put it on people that are fully representative of my audience. And people get so emotional when you show them something that looks like them and when they feel like you hear them and you care about them. And they vote.

And you can see that this dress had 74% yes when I put it on a white model whose typical model size. When I put it on an African-American model, the number dropped. And when I put it on a plus size model, it dropped even further.

Customer Feedback and Iterative Design

And we found out that plus size customers didn't like when the dresses had cutouts or when the arms were showing and all of these things. But we had the data to back it.

Using Polls and Surveys

So now I'm going to walk you through the demo of how this whole thing happened.

And this is a poll. I'm doing these polls all the time.

So Instagram is on stories. And for people who are not on Instagram, there's always a poll at the bottom of my newsletters. So whenever you're bored, you can just go and vote on things.

And I have these Google Sheets where I get the results. So people tell me yes, no all the time. But I also have this open box where I'm just asking them stuff all the time. Who are you? What do you want to see more of?

And it's a lot of text. And in the past, this used to take me forever. And now I just come here.

Analyzing Data with AI

I'm going to take this and we're going to go into ChatGPT. And I'm going to say, here are poll answers from my customers for a fashion brand. Tell me who they are, what they want, colors, anything I need to know.

Keep it easy for a designer to be able to just understand and design the right products. Or dresses. Let's see. Clothes. In case they want other things. I'm just going to go and copy paste the whole thing.

This is good for prototyping and getting feedback. But since ChatGPT and all these AI tools started, now I'm selling off these images and actually making money and not just getting ideas.

So I'm going to go into Mid Journey, and I'll show you different things I've done. So that image you just saw. Here's the prompt. So I'll be like, show me this outfit of this image on a realistic model.

That's a very simple prompt. But then you go in here and you have add images. And instead of adding an image, I go here and I actually add an image, but I make it a frame. So it becomes a video.

So you can select the images. I have a bunch of images I've put in. So I had put in that dress and then I ran it and it created a video. And now the dress that was just an idea, I can see what it looks like in the back because this whole time I had no idea what it looks like, even though I'm pretending to sell it.

And I have these videos of the model walking and you could put this on Instagram. People get really excited because now they're like, wait, what is this? Like, it's fun. You could take it further. So that's the video.

Prototyping and Product Development

We're still in the prototyping phase. You could also do something where

Creating Designs with AI

What I do is that I'll go online and I'll find a dress I really like or an image I really like and I put it into ChatGPT and I'll say, ChatGPT, tell me how to get something like this in mid-journey. What prompt do I put? That's how I end up with this very complicated prompt because I couldn't come up with this on my own.

The only difference with this prompt and the other one is that here I added the image, but instead of putting it as a frame to make a video, I made it a style reference. So it's taking the style of the image and generating similar things. And the image looked like an art piece. What she's wearing is a painting.

So it's now giving me options. So I went from that one single image I have to now having options. It's still very abstract.

But if I want to understand if my customers like how to neckline and other things, rather than sitting for hours and drawing it again, I could just run one of these online and, again, get another read. Another option is to get complete different variations.

So like, I know they like blue, and I know that they like dresses with cutouts and asymmetrical. So I could, again, put the same thing, full body of a fashion model wearing this exact dress in a white studio, professional lighting, high resolution, revolve e-commerce style. This is a website that takes very nice photos for fashion, so I just said the same style.

Cool girl aesthetic. I don't know what that means, but... Only non-cool people say that. I don't know. But I love being silly like that.

So again, I added the same image, but this one I put it as an image prompt. So this is what you can play with in Midjourney. And I'm using Midjourney not in the chat bot, but the web interface. And as you request things to create images, you can add image prompts. You can add a style reference.

And there's this thing called Omni Reference. And this is very interesting because you can use the image. And I'll run something and show it to you live, actually. This is still me trying different things and creating variations of the same product. So now it's getting more realistic. It used to be a sketch. Now it's looking more and more real.

Here I completely want to like go all out and I'm doing like cutouts. I'm making it more realistic. So it's saying full body photo of a tall model wearing this dress. I've given it the settings for the camera, DSLR, 85 millimeters, realistic proportions. So now it's looking more like a real person. And I mean, if you close up, maybe not, but for Instagram, this works.

Validating Ideas

I'm going to close this. And I still want variations. I'm not trying to get that same image exactly. I'm still in this like, I want variations and whatever looks good, that's what I'm going to sell. Because again, I'm just trying to sell what people like the most.

And then I'm going to show you an example of something where this was another poll that I did. And I had this dress and I'll show you the prompt. People told me they like, this was in the spring, people told me they like black and white and palm leaves.

So I went and drew something quickly, like literally I just scribbled black and white and palm leaves on my iPhone, like drawing it. And then I put it on a ghost image. and I put it here as a reference. So there's no model or anything. It's this ghost image right here. You see it's just floating.

So I put it in here and I said full body image, same settings. There is no body now, but I want a wrap dress and I know that they want wrap dresses and now I run it and I'm getting the wrap dress.

So these are images I actually used. um on the website at first to sell this dress and we sold so many of them that i ended up just getting the dress and shooting it for real so that's the ai images that we were selling off and because it was so popular just to show you how close it is to the real one i ended up making it for real and doing a real photo shoot because eventually if something is really important i'm going to put in some effort and i wore it in new york i was speaking at a panel i hope it let's see it's so slow

Okay, here's me wearing it. But this happened like two months later. The dress was selling. The whole time it was just a non-existing thing.

But...

Respecting Human Contributions

So what happened is that I'm still doing, people are like, oh, AI eliminates the human, it's all robots. We still have people working. We still have people actually making the clothes. We have photographers. All of that happens.

The only time is that now I'm actually more respectful of their time, because I only get them to work on something that matters. They're not spending time creating things that nobody's going to buy. Every time we do a shoot, it's because something has already been validated, and we've probably pre-sold it on AI form. And now it's so beautiful that we want to get it into real life, and we can put in that money.

So for me, when I look at AI as a tool, I feel like it's amplifying human creation rather than destroying it. And it's honoring humans in terms of having them spend times on things that matter.

So like the photographer is more excited to know that everything he's going to shoot is going to make it. It's not shooting things that may not sell or may not work. The artisan making the dress knows that the dress he's making has already been bought and paid for. He's not just guessing and it's beautiful and they want it. The textile designer digitizing this and getting it printed knows that this is something that people are already buying and want.

So that part is really exciting for me.

Success Stories and Conclusion

And I'm going to show you

This is another one that we launched last month. This is our best seller's dress. It's this one shoulder caftan. And we've done millions of dollars in sales in this dress.

And two months ago, I just did an AI community design capsule and asked people to vote because I have all these beautiful prints. And I was like, can you, we did a poll. We're like, vote on the top 10 prints you want us to bring as an exclusive in this dress. And they did.

And all these images, we didn't do a shoot because the whole concept was to encourage them to see this as like an efficient way of doing things. So these are all AI images. So the process I just showed you, You can do it over and over until it learns and understands. I couldn't do it in 15 minutes and get these perfect images, but I showed you how to start it. And as you give it feedback and edit it, you can refine. And I end up with these photos and we're selling this dress. Like this is our best selling silhouette in general. But now people get to have it in new prints without me having to waste time and go shoot and do samples. And none of this actually exists. I would say 90% of what's on my website is not real. I may have either an AI image or one sample that was made on one model, and then the real work happens once you place an order, and then it's made for you.

This is what it looks like when we actually really believe in something. Oh my God, it's frozen again. Okay, so of course these are real images, and I'm really proud of them because we only get to this stage when something is really... Oh, working, okay.

So yeah, this is some of our campaigns. So like all our campaigns are shot in beautiful destinations. I love traveling and partnering with hotels for these. And by the time we shoot something, it's already been bought. And we're just celebrating it now because people, fashion is still about love and magic and all these things. So these make you dream.

But the process that got us to this is so cost efficient that we are saving time, money, and resources, and we're honoring people in the process.

And these are some of our partners like Shopbob, Nordstrom, and everything you see on like these retailers started with AI. And it all goes back to communication.

I get friends close with the buyers. I kind of get to understand what they like, what are the trends. The same thing I do on Instagram, doing it with people on email. And as soon as I get a read of what they like, within like a few hours, they always are mind blown at how fast it is because they think it's real.

And like when I meet them first, I'm like, this is not real. It doesn't exist. And like, how do you do this? This is so mind blowing. I'm like, oh my God, it's so simple.

But Everybody can do it. I'm not gatekeeping. Everybody can do it.

The process of turning it into a real thing, that process takes work, and I really respect the people in our team that get there. But to get to this magical landing page on Shopbop or Notion, the work is fully tech-driven and community-driven. So that's what I do, and that's how I do it.

Ask a technical question.

Are you actually using AI to do the tech packs and the whole deal, or you have people that are working on... I have technical designers. I'm sure sometimes they get stuck on things. Like this morning, I had a technical designer working on a shirt, and she was like, I need to get the technical sketch. But the person who does it out of office today, and I just made it with chat GPT and sent it to her.

So that part, you still have oversight. You still have... Yeah, they're doing it.

But I'm trying to get them to be more efficient because that system, people in that world are very old school in general, and they fear the technology. So I'm trying to convince them it can be your friend.

You don't have to wait for someone to sketch it. You can just get it.

Let's give the audience a hand.