BENGALURU, 19 JAN

Do you struggle to pick the right outfits for work or party? Worry not, because a 19-year-old student from Bengaluru and three of his friends have created a virtual stylist app called WardrobeAI. The app acts as a personalised stylist that gives outfit suggestions.

First, you have to take photographs of all your clothes and upload them on the app. The app will then create a virtual wardrobe. Then, if you have a party to attend you could just ask the app: “What should I wear to a party with a red dress code?” The app will suggest combinations that work well for the party. It also takes into consideration of the weather and season of the user’s city while choosing the outfits.

The app, which uses artificial intelligence, is developed by Amal Palackal, a student of Greenwood High International School in Sarjapur, Bengaluru; Nandha Sankar from San Francisco State University; Richard Wong, a Boston University student and Josie Chu from New York University.

Amal was inspired to create it after one of his educational videos on AI apps that he made for his previous start-up Teegle went viral on TikTok. He had created Teegle, a Reddit-like educational platform that enables learning anywhere after he missed a lot of school days due to asthma. Unfortunately, Teegle shut down after the AI boom. “I was disheartened after Teegle’s failure but I did not give up. I used the coding that I learnt for two years to create Teegle to develop WardrobeAI in just two weeks,” Amal said.

What sets WardrobeAI apart from other similar apps is the AI. In other apps, one has to manually fill out long surveys on preferences and style whereas in WardrobeAI, the AI analyses clothes and automatically fills out details such as colour, material and type. It personalises the style and recommendations according to the user’s taste.

The app also has a shopping recommendation feature that is integrated with e-commerce platforms such as Amazon. To complete your outfit, the app also gives suggestion on how to add accessories such as shoes and jewellery.

The app was launched in October 2023 for IOS and has over 400 users from eight countries with over 1,000 garments uploaded to virtual wardrobes. The team is looking forward to launching the Android version soon with some new features. Meanwhile, Android users can use the website version of the application.

“WardrobeAI aims to be the place where the world finds what it wears and buys,” said Nandha, the marketing head.

Amal, who plans on taking WadrobeAI to greater heights, also wants to build the next generational tech company that deals with data privatisation as he believes that a user has a right to privacy and current Silicon Valley companies could do a better job with regards to it. "In the next 10 years, I want to build a company that helps protect all internet users' data," said Amal.