Vyking is an AR solutions provider for the fashion industry, transforming the customer experience through scalable virtual try-on. Without the jargon: try on thousands of pairs of shoes virtually through your phone’s camera!
How did you come up with the idea for the company?
We have all been fascinated by augmented reality for many years now and took a lot of inspiration from Snapchat launching face lenses back in early 2015.
We built our own sponsored lens ad network, running similar sponsored lenses campaigns in mobile apps that integrated our face tracking technology.
We wanted to do something bolder though and after observing the activity in the try-on space for cosmetics and eyewear, with brands reporting significant increases in both product interaction and conversion rates, we started to think about whether it would be possible to track human feet for on-foot product visualization, i.e. trying on shoes virtually in the same way.
So in 2018 we created a concept video and tagged all the brands and platforms we thought might be interested. Many of them quickly got in touch with us, wanting to test it.
For us, this was clear market validation so we then set out to build the first prototype – it took a while to get something customer-ready but already in 2019 we had integrated our solution into the global adidas app as well as POIZON, the largest sneaker marketplace in China.
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How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?
We’ve added a lot of functionality to our platform to make it possible for retailers to quickly scale up deployment of 3D models for virtual try-on, automating this workflow completely. This has allowed our customers to quickly scale up from tens of products to thousands.
The first virtual try-on solutions we released were app-based (for iOS and Android) and in early 2021, we released our web-based solution, which makes it possible for brands and e-commerce platforms without apps to access and integrate the try-on technology. We’ve been growing the team and have brought some exceptionally talented people into the company. We’re all still enjoying the ride despite the ups and downs that come with entrepreneurship!
What can we hope to see from Vyking in the future?
Rolling this technology out to hundreds of thousands of products across the entire online fashion retail ecosystem. Pioneering the next generation of AI-assisted 3D content creation without need for photogrammetry.
