GO FORWARD: Tagwalk adds trend prediction to its services.

The Paris-based fashion search engine is launching a new AI-powered dashboard that combines the detailed tagging of 410,000 images of more than 1,300 brands with insights gleaned from the search history of its 300,000-strong community of fashion professionals.

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“We realized that we had so much information (in Tagwalk) that there was definitely a way to be able to predict and understand what products were being made and what was performing,” said founder and CEO Alexandra Van Houtte.

Eighteen months in development in-house, the new service takes the form of a prediction dashboard divided into categories ranging from colors and materials to themes, styling and even beauty. Trends identified thanks to impressions, achievements and rankings calculated without human intervention.

“Our audience really succeeded in giving us a new model for forecasting and trend analysis that is not on the market yet,” Van Houtte said.

Users can also review which keywords and searches have led to specific brands, as well as compare terms and trending behaviors. It also offers a read on demographics and territories for the users who have searched for these trends.

Tagwalk described the new feature as a solution to combat the “excessive research burden” that led to missed opportunities for fashion companies and could help tackle the overproduction of unwanted items.

For brands like Adidas, a longtime customer of Tagwalk’s existing reporting service, the real-time analysis and quality of data is a big selling point, according to Therese Hermann, head of hype insights at the sports giant.

“Knowing what our consumers are buying elsewhere helps us not only offer our (wholesalers) exactly what they need and will sell, but also empower our product teams in their decision-making and sales process,” Hermann told WWD in an e- mail.

Van Houtte emphasized that the new feature would not replace designers, but instead help brands “calibrate a little better,” she said.

In addition to designers using the information to orient their creations, Van Houtte pointed out that the information could be used by sellers to curate a product range, but also by social media managers who want to tailor their upcoming posts to what consumers are looking at.

For the seven-year-old French company, the dashboard addition is part of a wider reshaping of its service offering.

While brand searches and lookbook viewing remain free, keyword searches and moodboard creation are behind a paywall that was introduced in the fall and costs 100 euros per year, with a big discount for students. Access to the trend forecasting dashboard starts at €2,100 a month.

“What we didn’t want is for people to (just) depend on us consulting services (services) and reportswe want people to use us every day as a fully automated SaaS service,” said Van Houtte. “Obviously it’s a game changer for us in terms of (business) but also in terms of technology, because we had all this data that wasn’t really being used correctly or efficiently.”

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