<div><em>The website allows users to navigate through a process of increasingly streamlined refinement, purely based on visuals. <strong>Simar Singh </strong>reports</em><br><br>The struggle to find exactly what you want online is often very real. Looking to simplify this very problem, e-tailing giant Snapdeal, at a preview at their Okhla office introduced findmystyle.in, a fashion product discovery engine that works by allowing users to navigate through a process of increasingly streamlined refinement, purely based on visuals.</div><div> </div><div>The company’s Chief Product Officer, Anand Chandrasekaran, describing the engine as a “open technology playground” that could be used by in-house engineers and users alike, said, “The feature will further enhance customer experience and make online shopping faster, better and more informative. With the introduction of findmystyle.in, we are looking to create an experimental playground and set the base for our image modelling, product search and discovery technology.” </div><div> </div><div>The website which is now live, allows users to make an initial selection of the category they are looking to make a purchase in after which, all kinds of variations of styles pertaining to the selection are clustered together and presented, from this the narrowing down process starts. Once, the user likes a particular style, they have the option of viewing similar products and are eventually redirected to the product page on Snapdeal’s flagship e-store, where they can complete the purchase.</div><div> </div><div>“Different strokes for different folks”, says Chandrasekaran explaining the rationale behind the entire mechanism and its attempt to essentially visually assist where description on an indivitual level often fails. “I might like a dress at a party, so I know what I want but can’t really describe it,” he says adding that this was where visuals would help a user identify what they are looking for. </div><div> </div><div>Chandrasekaran hopes that findmystyle.in’s image based discovery model will help the company understand how offline behaviour finds itself online and how this can be recreated and accommodated in the overall shopping experience.</div><div> </div><div>There are no plans of integrating findmystyle.in with snapdeal.com as of now and Chandrasekaran hopes that the product will “find its own niche”. The company does have plans to prompt regular Snapdeal users to try findmystyle.in by featuring it on the flagship store, however, how this is to be enabled is still being worked out.</div><div> </div><div>The site has been developed at Snapdeal’s Multimedia Research Lab in Bangalore and is the brain child of research scientists Gaurav Aggarwal, Nikhil Rasiwasia and Deepthi Singh. The trio had earlier founded Fashiate, a tech start-up that was acquired by the Snapdeal in March this year. According to Chandrasekaran, this research lab will see an investment of $100 million in the next two to three years. </div><div> </div><div>Findmystyle.in will currently only be available on web, as this, according to Snapdeal, works best with their plans to use the platform as a playground where algorithms and use cases can be tested and quickly changed. </div><div> </div>
