Fanatics teams up with OpenAI for new AI-powered shopping suggestion feature

At any given moment, Fanatics offers more than 1.5 million unique SKUs for sports fans to buy — from jerseys and hats to team-branded streetwear and socks. The search for those items is getting easier with a new feature called "Shop the Look," created with the help of OpenAI's Codex.

Fanatics' product assortment reflects its rise into a massive sports-industry platform, with deals with nearly every major sports league and team worldwide. Each year, Fanatics Commerce manufactures more than 45 million items and sells them to customers in more than 180 countries.

But Justin Tsai, chief product officer for Fanatics Commerce, said that growth has also created a challenge for the company.

"One problem we just kept seeing was that our customers come to our sites, and we operate hundreds of these sites … their challenges are that they're always trying to look through our very large catalog to figure out what they can buy," he said.

Tsai said customers' shopping sessions routinely ran over 30 minutes on average, and that time kept compounding as Fanatics released upwards of a thousand new products each week.

"Shop the Look" suggests coordinated outfits on each product page, matching those items with other in-stock items based on team and intended style.

Traditional shopping curation strategies, like photo shoots and stylized outfits, have lead times that don't always work with Fanatics' rapidly increasing product pool, or for quickly-released items like championship shirts and hats, Tsai said.

Random suggestions don't work for sports fans either. "Nobody who is a Los Angeles Dodgers fan wants to be matched with a San Francisco Giants item … team and player alignment is extremely important in our world," he said.

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"In the past we were trying to stitch together something that would be good to show a customer," DeArago said. "With AI, you can do more deterministic matching to do personalization in this next-level way."

The Shop The Look feature on Fanatics.com

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