// about Fashwell
Fashwell is a Swiss computer vision company, founded in 2014, that builds image recognition tools for fashion and home and living retail. The core product is a visual search engine: a shopper uploads any photo, a screenshot, a street style shot, a picture from a magazine, and gets matched to shoppable products in the retailer's catalogue. About 30% of text-based fashion searches return nothing useful, because people often know what they want visually but can't put it into words. Visual search sidesteps that entirely. The API covers more ground than search alone. It handles similar product recommendations, outfit completion (feed it a model image and it identifies every item she is wearing, ready to add to the page for purchase), and automatic catalogue tagging for colour, style, occasion, and garment type. There is also aesthetic profiling, which classifies a shopper's broader taste, "bohemian," "heritage," and so on, to personalise what they see across sessions. Clients include Zalando, Nelly.com, and Bonprix. Fashwell puts its recommendation engine's engagement lift at up to 250% and conversion improvement at 35%. Visual search, according to the company, runs 8x faster than keyword-based alternatives. Retailers don't send customers to a separate Fashwell interface; everything integrates into their own apps and storefronts via the API.