Reimagine Your Space: Exploring Wayfair’s Decorify AI App

0:00Wayfair, the home furniture company, is launching a very interesting AI initiative that I think is going to make a very big impact on furniture and home decor in general. So today on the podcast, we're going to be diving into this world of interior design, how AI is impacting it, and how we see this going in the future. So the first thing I want to say before diving into the news story is the fact that I actually have family members that are very involved in the furniture business, and they are very interested in how AI, like I'm sure every other company is, will impact their business. And one area that I've seen them specifically focusing on is actually having MidJourney generate interior design concepts for them.

0:43And I think it's really interesting even from the fact of like some of their furniture suppliers are using AI to generate product designs, right? Like trendy new couch, interesting new innovative XYZ. And I've seen all sorts of like really interesting or trendy or innovative kind of interior design concepts that are being generated on MidJourney. And what's interesting here is I do believe that AI is going to play a big role shaping furniture and interior design trends into the future as it comes up with more interesting, nuanced, new and creative design concepts that we haven't actually seen before.

1:20So without further ado, let's jump into the main story. And the main story here is the fact that the online furniture and home goods Titan, which is, of course, Wayfair, is really pushing the boundary of tech innovation. And they have introduced a new product, which is called Decorify, which is essentially a new app that is aimed to kind of revamp the way that consumers visualize their home's potential. So Decorify has been designed with the concept that it really is trying to build this shoppable and photorealistic renderings of rooms and is allowing you to virtually try out different decor styles and different furniture in your house.

2:05So users can essentially take a picture of their home or their apartment and Decorify is going to turn it into a visualized design playground. So essentially, it's going to allow you to transform that room into a whole bunch of different styles. You can try modern farmhouse or bohemian or industrial. And I think it is a really kind of a fun idea. It's a cool concept you can imagine and you can visually see what your house would look like in a bunch of different styles. I think the innovation behind it is really a man by the name of Shenik Seladgi, who is the director of R &D at Wayfair. So Sadelgi really said in an interview to TechCrunch recently that the very basis of Decorify has been under construction for quite a while now.

2:54And the timely emergence of image-generated AI diffusion models, specifically OpenAI's Dolly 2, has proven to be kind of the missing piece that Wayfair needed to bring Decorify into existence. so I know that anyone listening to this podcast knows I have strong opinions about Dolly 2 I think it's kind of a piece of garbage but apparently they've been able to use it and been able to do really cool things to it and perhaps the reason that I don't like it is I'm just not very good at prompt engineering around that space so I'm willing to admit that and I'm also willing to admit that maybe Dolly 2 has made some improvements that being said I can say I have seen some absolutely incredible interior design concepts out of mid journey um and i'm no prompting wizard but with my limited experience i've been able to see uh specifically mid journey really excel in this space so i'm very curious to see uh kind of what uh decorify is able to do with dolly 2 and perhaps they're able to do a lot more than i you know know in my you know weak prompting i don't know whatever okay so this is what they say they say our hypothesis is that the quality is good enough to drive value for a customer um and wayfarer's customers are looking for and love visual inspiration so their hypothesis they said is that the quality is good enough to drive value for a customer what do you mean good enough i don't know i'm sorry i don't want to be a hater here but like honestly you go use mid journey there's no good enough that thing looks freaking almost photorealistic.

4:29It's mind-blowing. It's, you know, insane. It's amazing. It's not good enough. So I am very, very suspicious that Wayfair perhaps has not discovered anything that I haven't. And it's just kind of like okay interior designs, which is not what you want. You don't want an okay interior designs. You want incredible ones. So, you know, use some incredible technology. They also said that Wayfair's customers are looking for and love visual inspiration. they get that from our rich lifestyle imagery that we custom produce and curate now they can blend that with our spaces as for the user experience apparently it's pretty easy you launch decorify on the web desktop or mobile you can log in using your account credentials and you get ready to upload a photo of your space while decorify currently only supports living room photos wayfair promises that its scope is soon going to expand but for the moment you're going to be stuck with just living room decor.

5:26So I will say I did try to use this app and it said, you know, I think their website was crashed maybe because they had a lot of use or maybe they're trying to change something around, but you can't currently access Decorify. You might be able to try this later. But according to a reporter over at TuckCrunch who kind of got to go and test this out and use it and do a little demo of it, apparently the usage flow is really smooth. Apparently, essentially, you just upload a photo, pick a design style from a bunch of different options you got traditional modern farmhouse bohemian a bunch of others um and then essentially decorify transforms your room um and substitutes your existing home decor with items that kind of fit your style now this is kind of cool because um like on the one hand you can like there have been kind of apps where you point your phone to do like alternate reality essentially where you point your phone at like your living room and it magically makes like a couch appear where there was nothing before this is kind of cool in a sense that it takes your room and it removes stuff and then replaces it so i do think that is a cool concept i think that um you know this is not this isn't completely new right obviously there are those other ai tools but i think the combination of uh quote visual discovery and inspiration with shoppable products from an extensive catalog that covers everything home decorify has a potential to drive significant value for wayfair customers that's what sad olgi said about it in any case um during i believe some reports over tech crunch they got that initial testing and during their initial testing um apparently decorify's performance was they said satisfactory but not without a few hiccups it occasionally struggled to accurately reflect certain styles and the proposed substitutes for furniture and other home items were not always spot on so i mean i don't want to sit here and kind of like hate on wayfair too much i will just say this is probably a result of the technology platform they've chosen to use ahem uh dolly too but anyways um so daggy was quick to clarify that decorify's current version is still in its early stages and then it's going to improve over time i think that's great right we we can live in a little bit of room to improve but at present the app leverages stable diffusion an open source diffusion model from stability ai and wayfair intends to refine this base model with its own proprietary image data um over time so right they're using dolly too uh they're using stability AI.

7:47Apparently, they're going to make it better and kind of refine it on their own, similar to what MidJourney has done. So it'll be interesting to see how that goes. This is what they did say, though. They said, quote, in the short term, Decorify will support more rooms and improve the shop ability. We plan to offer swap out furniture with specific furniture you may have already found on Wayfair so customers can visualize how a product may look in their space. And that was Solidoggy that said that. So I think the move from Wayfair to deploy generative AI tech aligns with similar attempts from other e-commerce companies.

8:16All of them really right now are hoping to capitalize on the potential boost in sales. So Google, of course, is a famous one that has recently rolled out a Generative AI experience that enables users to try clothes on different models before making a purchase. And Amazon is experimenting with Generative AI to essentially summarize product reviews within its shopping app. So I think these advancements continue to emerge. And as this happens, one thing is clear, the future of online shopping really is set to become a lot more interactive personalized and engaging and this is all thanks to ai which we are very excited to continue following along with