Amazon Echo Look Now Available to Everyone, Will Suggest New Items to Purchase
Amazon Echo Look is now available for purchase by anyone. Echo Look was originally announced in April 2017, but was only available by invitation. An announcement by Amazon this morning summarized the unique features of Amazon’s fashion-focused smart speaker:
“Alexa on Echo Look is the style assistant that gives you personalized recommendations, helps keep your closet organized, and provides fashion inspiration. Features like Style Check, Collections, and suggestions of new pieces to complement your existing wardrobe all come with Echo Look, which is now available to all customers for $199.99 at www.amazon.com/echolook.
“To keep track of your styles, use Daily Look—each photo or short video you take of an outfit is automatically added to a lookbook that you can browse for inspiration and tag with descriptions. You can also filter looks by color to easily find a specific piece or decide whether you need yet another black top. The Collections feature helps organize your closet by category for easy searching. The Echo Look app will automatically organize Daily Looks into groups including Favorites, Seasons, and Weather. You can then create your own personalized collections like outfits for your vacation, business trip, items to donate, and more.
“Style Check, one of the most popular features on Echo Look, gives you a second opinion on which of two outfits looks best on you—simply submit two photos and, in about a minute, Style Check will return a recommendation based on fit, color, styling, and current trends, plus an explanation of why one is better. One of the newest features on Echo Look will suggest items that pair well with clothes you already own to help you get more out of your closet. Recommended items are all shoppable on Amazon.com.”
Echo Look = Sell More Clothes
And there you have it. Echo Look will suggest items to complement your wardrobe there are conveniently available on Amazon.com to purchase. Drawing on her seven years in the fashion industry, Voicebot’s Ava Mutchler last year predicted this development:
“No brand has access to an entire person’s wardrobe. But now, Amazon will. The possibilities are endless when it comes to using this data to increase Amazon’s fashion e-commerce sales. Once Style Check learns what you like, Amazon could provide recommendations for new items. It could also provide options for you when you’re looking for something in particular, like shoes to go with a new dress or a new top to complement a pair of pants you already own.” April 2017
Coresight Research reported earlier this year that third-party products account for 86.3% of apparel listings on Amazon.com. Those products are listed on the website for sale, but are fulfilled by the manufacturer. And, Amazon private label apparel items account for about 0.1% of all listings. As a result, Echo Look is likely to be a tool to sell more clothing in general and not just private label products from Amazon. The key here is that Echo Look is about offering fashion advice that is not limited by what you own today. Amazon simply wants to use AI to sell more clothing.
The device seems to be getting a positive reaction from fashion industry types that were invited into the trial program over the past year.
“As a person who won’t generally listen to style tips—not even from my mom or my husband—I’m surprised by how easily I’ve taken to my very own tabletop Tim Gunn.”—New York Post
Purpose-Built Device
Echo Look has always been something of an oddity in the Echo lineup because it takes pictures as part of its fashion service and has full Alexa capabilities, but Amazon never really promoted it. The product page also has a small disclaimer around the audio quality capabilities of the small speaker in the device:
“Echo Look has a small, 1.6-watt speaker that sounds about the same as the speaker on a smartphone. For room-filling sound and hands-free calling and messaging with Alexa, we recommend Amazon Echo, Echo Plus, or Echo Show.”
Amazon is trying to be clear that Echo Look is a purpose-built device and not a general purpose device. If you buy it, you should make the purchase because of its unique features such as Style Check, Daily Look and recommendations. If you have used Echo Look, let me know on Twitter what you think about it.
