Wardro8e: AI Fashion Discovery

A fashion discovery app that learned your taste from what you saved and skipped, and ranked outfits by visual similarity using CLIP embeddings. It made money through affiliate links. I shipped it to real users and shut it down when the economics failed.

Ask me about it

Year: 2025
Duration: 2025 to 2026
Status: Shut down, 2026

Outcome

Shipped to real users. Shut down in May 2026 when the affiliate model stopped adding up.

Stack

React NativeExpoSupabaseFastAPIPythonCLIPHuggingFace

What I built

Onboarding style quiz.
Personalised swipe feed ranked on CLIP embeddings.
Collections, saves and a trending view.

Why I shut it down

The pitch was Pinterest for outfits, with a feed that got better the more you used it, and people did use it. The trouble was the business model.

A spreadsheet killed it. I worked through the unit economics of a better-funded competitor running the same affiliate model. Fashion affiliate rates are thin, so the model only pays at volume, and you can't afford to buy that volume until the model pays.

I shut it down in May 2026. I knew it was over a while before I admitted it.

When I started Scri8e in July, I did more than ten customer calls before writing any code. With Wardro8e I built the hard part first and checked the business far too late.

I'd build the recommendation pipeline the same way again.