Name: Olivia Parkes
Company: Persi
Position: Co-Founder and CEO
Website: https://yourpersi.com
About Olivia Parkes
I founded Persi in 2024 after several years of iterating on an idea driven by one belief: online personalisation is not truly personal. Retailers rely on shallow behavioural signals such as clicks, browsing and single brand purchase history. Yet no one shops from just one brand. Without understanding what a customer already owns, their intent and their evolving style, personalisation cannot feel relevant.
Persi is the AI personalisation layer for fashion ecommerce that brings AI and a two way conversation directly into the onsite shopping experience. It enables retailers to move beyond click based algorithms and instead understand the individual shopper. Persi learns from what customers own across their wardrobe, their individual style and intent, and that intelligence travels with them as they shop across retailers powered by Persi. This transforms personalisation into something contextual, human and portable, allowing retailers to surface the right products at the right time for the right customer.
The journey to building Persi has not been straightforward. Early on I had to restart the business due to significant errors made by a previous cofounder. With no funding and no technical background, I rebuilt from first principles. To prove that shoppers wanted to shop this way and that retailers would pay, I created a concierge style MVP using four separate platforms stitched together manually to simulate how the AI would work. I built complete looks around items in customers wardrobes and linked them to products available online, servicing paying customers while validating demand.
Despite being fully manual behind the scenes, the results were compelling. We achieved 90 percent style accuracy, 88 percent purchase intent, with 34 percent of customers purchasing between one and six items and the remainder planning to buy. 96 percent said they would use Persi again. These proof points unlocked retailer conversations that led to our first pilots and an oversubscribed pre seed investment round.
Since launching with retail partners, Persi has delivered measurable commercial impact. Across live pilots, shoppers who receive a Persi recommendation convert at 13 percent, nearly three times the retailer baseline, alongside an uplift of 8.7 percent in average order value. In an industry facing rising acquisition costs, declining conversion rates and high return rates, this level of uplift is meaningful.
This impact on the industry is structural. Persi enables retailers to compete and thrive in the era of AI and hyper personalisation without replatforming their stack. More importantly, it shifts ecommerce from optimising clicks to understanding people. It allows shoppers to be seen as individuals rather than data segments, redefining what personalisation should mean in modern commerce and setting a new standard for the future of fashion retail.
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