The clothing market is nearly 2 trillion dollars. If even a small portion of this market can be captured by amateur clothing designers, who are provided with the necessary AI tools and infrastructure, it will result in huge earnings. Most of which will be made not by the creators, but by the corresponding platforms 😉 And here is a promising example of such a platform.
Project Essence
Off/Script is a platform where athletes, bloggers, designers, and other creators can launch sales of products they have conceived: clothing, bags, accessories, and home decor items.
The first feature of the startup is that even non-specialists in this area can design products. For this purpose, the Off/Script platform includes an AI editor based on Stable Diffusion, where different prompts can be inputted to get images of products that can even be rotated and viewed from different angles.
The second feature is that the images uploaded to the site have the chance to turn into real products. For this to happen, Off/Script users vote for the images uploaded to the site. If a product gets many votes, the startup will start its real production and sale.
The startup itself does not engage in production; instead, it has agreements with 1,000 manufacturers capable of custom-manufacturing various types of goods.
The manufactured products will be sold on the Off/Script website. In addition, the creator of the product can sell it through their website or blog, and Off/Script will take care of all the hassle associated with production and logistics, including the delivery of ordered goods to the end customers.
The creator of a product that Off/Script has taken into production will receive 20% of the revenue from the sales of that product, with $500 paid by the startup immediately after the decision to produce.
The idea of the startup emerged this spring when a designer friend of the founders published a picture of a product he conceived on social networks and received many inquiries like, ‘How can I buy this?’, to which he replied that he unfortunately did not know how to actually produce it.
Then the founders started negotiating with manufacturers and developed a mechanism for voting and launching products into production. A few months after the preliminary launch, they collected product options created by 50 well-known designers and athletes that they would like to start producing and selling.
So far, only the first of these products, a sports backpack, has actually gone on sale on the site.
The startup recently released an iPhone app, marking the official public launch of the platform.
Off/Script hails from Canada, conceived only this spring, but the startup has already managed to raise $7 million in its first round of investments.
What’s Interesting
Another proof that there are no unique ideas is the South Korean startup Vice Versa, which recently raised 1.3 billion won (about 1 million USD) in investments for an app where any user can create their own clothing designs using AI.
It operates on a similar principle to Off/Script – within the app there is an AI editor where different prompts can be set to get images of products.
Users of the app also form a community where members can follow each other, comment and vote for the designs they like.
Additionally, the app regularly holds competitions in partnership with fashion brands and events in the fashion industry, where users can create designs of a given type and style.
Experts from partners and users of the app vote for the designs submitted to the competition, and the winners receive cash prizes.
Some of these designs might also go into production, but the terms are negotiated separately on a case-by-case basis – there is no standard mechanism for this, as in Off/Script.
AI is becoming an effective tool not only for automating routine work but also for creativity. I recently wrote about the Hive3 platform, where brands regularly hold competitions for creating pictures, videos, and advertising campaigns. But with one condition – the works must be created using AI tools. This allows brands to receive a sufficient number of quality works within days and weeks, from which they can choose something worthy.
AI not only helps accelerate the creative process. It also allows people who have never been involved in creativity to do so – because they lacked purely technical abilities. For example, they couldn’t draw, though they might have had ideas for wonderful paintings. Or they couldn’t write music, but cool melodies were born in their heads.
But now they can do it with AI! Thus, creativity can become a much more massive occupation, accessible to a significantly larger number of people. In other words, such a change should seriously and substantially increase the size of the creative economy market.
Where to Run
Today’s Off/Script and Vice Versa want to make this qualitative breakthrough in the clothing and accessories market, where previously one had to know and be able to do many things in different areas – starting from drawing, design, cutting to the intricacies of production.
The beauty is that the clothing and accessories market is regular and huge. Its size is currently estimated at 1.74 trillion dollars.
And if even a small part of it is captured by ‘amateur creators’ who can achieve this with the help of AI and outsourced production and logistics processes – this translates into very big money.
Most of it will go into the pockets of those platforms that gave the amateur creators the corresponding AI tools and infrastructure. Therefore, creating such platforms is a promising direction for potential movement.
The model of today’s Off/Script has quickly demonstrated the first indicators of interest among creators, users, and investors. Therefore, it can be taken as a starting point for entering this very moneyed market.
About the Company
Off/Script
Website: offscriptmtl.com
Latest Round: $7M, 21.11.2023
Total Investment: $7M, rounds: 1