Let's get phygital: How DeFacto is personalizing fashion with tech

Abdurrahman Kılınç , CIO, DeFacto

Abdurrahman Kılınç: We operate more than 500 stores in 100 countries, and we want to make fashion affordable to our customers all around the world. I'm not just talking about price and availability. We’re trying to give our customers a one-stop shopping experience with a wide variety of products.

DeFacto defines itself as a customer-obsessed and “phygital” brand. “Phygital” (physical/digital) means we try to provide a seamless, high-quality, personalized digital experience – even in our physical stores. That’s why we regularly invest in technologies that help us understand our customers better.

Gavin Allen: What motivated DeFacto's digital transformation?

Abdurrahman Kılınç: I think most companies should turn into technology companies as soon as possible; otherwise, there is no future. Widespread adoption of technology has fundamentally affected customer behavior and the shopping experience. You have to provide what the customer expects from you; and now, the customer expects a digital and technological experience. Using technology and AI, I believe we can achieve this.

Gavin Allen: How does that play into DeFacto's business, in terms of design and service?

Abdurrahman Kılınç: Because AI is our top priority, we decided to allocate all of our resources and all of our workforce to AI-driven projects this year. Even a small feature won't be processed unless it helps our AI-driven strategy. We are restructuring our processes and business models with an AI-centric perspective.

For example, on our website, you can see our AI-created models and virtual try-on products. From a flat photo of a product, we can create a virtual model with AI and put the outfit on the model. We can change the colors in seconds. These features have reduced our studio and photography costs. Next year, we are aiming to convert all our photos and all our models to 100% AI.

We just released our AI-driven personalized recommendation engine. We understand what you’re keen to buy, or what you’d like to see. We know when you add a product to a cart. So, we understand all of this and we make recommendations directly to you on our website. This has performed 30% better than the old system.

Soon, we will launch our DeFacto AI agent platform. It may actually become a personal assistant for our employees.

We’ve started assigning some AI agents to make clothing designs for us, using prompts we give them. It seems to be working. We will start to produce AI-generated designs soon.

Gavin Allen: What impact has the collaboration with Huawei Cloud had on your business, particularly on operational efficiency, decision-making, and data analysis?

Abdurrahman Kılınç: I think there are some core requirements for these types of transformations, and infrastructure comes first. Without rock-solid infrastructure, you cannot allocate resources, or focus on other transformations, like AI.

I can clearly state that our success in cloud migration enabled our AI transformation, and it's still helping us. Throughout this journey, Huawei became a very important partner for us. First, we started to migrate our e-commerce platform with Huawei. After achieving this, we are now working on migrating the entire application and infrastructure to the cloud. By next year, all our infrastructure and platforms will be converted to 100% cloud native. So now, I'm happy to reduce my costs, and I'm happy to reduce my maintenance efforts.

We are already getting some benefits from the ecosystem. It gives us huge agility. I mean, we can trial and we can release within a short time. For instance, this year, we migrated our CRM system to an AI-driven solution, which comes from the Huawei ecosystem. Soon, we will make all our segments and campaigns and bonus management 100% AI.

Gavin Allen: In terms of design and service, how do you balance the new capabilities of technology with the human side of fashion?

Abdurrahman Kılınç: Actually, I think that with these kinds of transformations, the cultural part is the toughest part. You can find any technology, you can provide any service to your customer, but adapting this into your business model, into your processes, is quite difficult. So, in that way, we are prioritizing the interaction between our employees and the AI systems. We want our employees to play a role in using and developing these AI systems. We say, “Don't waste your time by doing day-to-day tasks.”

Gavin Allen: So, it's a kind of partnership between the employees and the AI?

Abdurrahman Kılınç: Exactly. And, as AI develops with the experience of our employees, it will perform better, as well. So, it's a win-win situation.

If you want to get higher performance from AI, then the experience of your employees, their know-how, is important. If they work together, then one drives the other.