Ria Chakrabarti is the founder and CEO of Veristyle, a consumer app that uses AI to help young women discover the clothes that match their body type.
Users upload pictures to the app, which are then analysed with computer vision tools to provide automated styling tips on the best fabrics, cuts, patterns, and colours for the individual’s features. Founded in 2022, the startup says it has attracted more than 40,000 global users in six months.
Veristyle said it plans to pilot a B2B service soon to embed its technology on any retail platform.
In this week’s Founder in Five Q&A, Chakrabarti explains why the social media team was the most important early hire, shares her productivity tips and reveals what she’d be doing if she wasn’t an entrepreneur.
1. Which role was the most important early hire you made?
Ria Chakrabarti: Our social media team was definitely the most important early hire. They are critical to our success and unprecedented early traction. Our marketing lead is an extremely talented social media strategist who is fantastic at outsmarting the algorithms over a sustained period of time.
Hiring her early was a game changer for us and cemented our brand online before we even had to focus on traction.
2. Who’s a leader you admire in your industry?
RC: I really admire Sima Ved from the Apparel Group. She clearly walks the walk when it comes to giving back. As an Indian female leader in the retail space, she is incredibly outspoken and consistently embraces the advantages being a woman gives her as a leader.
One example of this is the Apparel Group’s positive incentive programs for employee retention and their ability to keep top talent without being unnecessarily cut-throat. This is in stark contrast to other retail companies that have scaled to similar heights, offering fewer growth opportunities and alleged toxic company cultures.
3. In another life you’d be?
RC: Starting Veristyle has truly felt to be a natural path for me. I really find myself motivated by getting totally novel products out to market and in people’s hands. However, in another life I think I would have liked to continue to nurture my more academic side and do more academic research where I did not quite find the satisfaction of building products that could actually be used by someone immediately.
4. Excluding your own, what’s a sector that’s ripe for disruption?
RC: Wellness tech. I think the success of Zoe, Ultrahuman, and others shows just how ready the general public is to shift towards a focus on everyday health and wellness optimisation and away from traditional “sick care”.
What can we do to leverage today’s technology to get health monitoring in everyone’s hands? Will we see monitors in our toilets? Skin cancer screenings through your smartphone? Even though other companies have found a lot of traction in this sector already, I think there is so much room for further disruption putting advanced health monitoring tools in the hands of everyday consumers.
5. Do you have a productivity hack?
RC: I wouldn’t so much as call it a hack but I have two essentials for a productive day: a morning walk outside no matter the weather and a morning workout. Both of these are fundamental parts of my daily routine to make sure my brain is starting off on the right track and that I’m able to be my best self for the company.
Another ‘hack’ that works a lot for me personally is increasing the amount of Omega-3s I eat in a day. This does a lot to boost my mood, particularly in overcast London. Foods I go to are often berries, flaxseeds, and fish.
Founder in Five – a UKTN Q&A series with the entrepreneurs behind the UK’s innovative tech startups, scaleups and unicorns – is published every Friday.
The post Veristyle founder: Hire a social media strategist to outsmart the algorithms appeared first on UKTN.
