For the past 13 years, Stitch Fix has been dedicated to taking the guesswork out of getting dressed. Our clients trust our Stylists, and the billions of insights we’ve gathered on style and fit, to help them perfect their look and build their wardrobes. However, despite clients having a clear sense of the styles they like and don’t like, we know how difficult it can be to put that into words. After learning that nearly half (48%) of clients surveyed for our 2024 Style Forecast find defining their personal style to be a top challenge when shopping for clothes, we knew we were uniquely positioned to help.
Enter StyleFile – a personalized resource that describes each client’s unique style personality and the specific elements that contribute to it. Initially introduced last month as part of the sign-up process for new clients, we are excited to announce that, as of this week, StyleFile is now available to all of our men’s and women’s clients.
We took our deep style and trend knowledge and reviewed it alongside our extensive client data to determine the most prevalent Style Types–categories that represent a subset of looks. Think: Classic to Bold, Boho to Edgy, and everything in between. (You can find the full list here).
We then created an exclusive StyleFile quiz through which clients rate their favorite outfit combinations or individual items within a particular look. This is similar to our Style Shuffle feature where clients can ‘thumbs-up’ or ‘thumbs-down’ certain styles on their homepage.
From there, our team designed a proprietary AI model that analyzes and combines clients’ answers – including both ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ – and scores them against the Style Types to identify their multi-layered style personality. For example, Classic + Edgy + Contemporary + Heritage + Active = Modern Muse.
StyleFile is designed to serve multiple purposes. In addition to helping clients articulate their individual style personality, it helps assure our clients that we “get” them. We are also using it as a tool to help people shop. Clients who shop on Freestyle can now search by their unique personality (in addition to seeing the curated, shoppable outfit ideas that reflect their style personality). And, we are in the process of integrating StyleFile more deeply into our core styling experience.
StyleFile has been available to new clients for about a month and we’ve discovered interesting insights on the most popular style personalities. The top personality for women clients is Rustic Rebel–an Edgy-Heritage mix–followed by Modern Muse and Rustic Casual. For men, it’s Adventure Sport–an Active-Rugged hybrid–followed by Modern Prep and Coastal Sport. For anyone wondering, I’m a Classic Sport, along with about 2% of other Stitch Fix men’s clients.
I’m excited about StyleFile and how it will enable us to create new engagement opportunities, as well as build deeper connections with our clients. This is just the beginning, and we plan to add to StyleFile’s capabilities so it can function as a powerful tool for our clients and enable us to deliver even better styling experiences to them.