Flair changes product photography – practical e-commerce

Mickey Friedman co-founded Flair.ai in 2022, a year after graduating from the University of Chicago. The company, which has raised $5 million in seed funding, uses artificial intelligence to enhance product photos, providing entire virtual scenes and setups.

In her opinion, this process is changing the face of e-commerce photography, dramatically reducing the cost of photo sessions while improving the quality.

In our last conversation, she touched on the development of visual artificial intelligence, the need for human intervention, and more. All audio is embedded below. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Eric Bandholz: Who the hell are you?

Mickey Friedman: I have a company called Flair. We launched in 2023. We are building an AI tool for product photos, visualizations and animations. We strive to streamline the photo shoot process by turning it into an easy-to-use virtual studio at a much lower cost.

We are a team of five. We have already accepted over a million users.

We start with existing photos of sellers’ products. We perform color correction, record subtitles and make the entire virtual scene available. Protecting your brand and text is important to us.

I was early in the AI ​​art scene. I was interested in marketing and photo shoots, but I was more drawn to the creative process, playing with AI models to create art. In the beginning, the process involved taking a piece of text and generating images. There’s still a place for it, like Midjourney. However, e-commerce companies want to preserve their brands and assets and control the visual arrangement of their scenes.

Bandholz: How are sellers using your tool so far?

Friedman: Images for landing pages and organic social posts are very popular. We try to define the creative process of a photo session. Many AI tools remove humans from this process, but we want the opposite, where our clients realize any vision.

People who are interested in Flair often find themselves at the intersection of e-commerce and creativity – they have an in-house design team or an agency at their disposal. They understand our platform intuitively.

There are a lot of storyboards in Flair. We have had clients with a vision for a dream photo shoot that they were unable to implement due to extensive coordination and costs. Using Flair, they upload raw product photos onto Canvas, find the props they need, and more or less recreate their photo shoot on the platform.

Bandholz: Flair seems ready to scale up.

Friedman: It’s a very big market. We want every brand in the world to use us in some capacity. Smaller brands with budget constraints may forgo photo shoots, while larger brands that can afford photo shoots need better tools.

Regardless, as long as companies need photo shoots, we hope Flair will be involved in their workflow. This is our goal.

We branch out into verticals. In the case of fashion brands, we can place a sweater, for example, on a virtual human model. In the case of product advertising, we reduce costs.

We want as much traction as possible for smaller brands. But we’ll probably move up a bit, although we’ll never be too expensive – much less than $500 a month.

Over time, our AI models will be refined, thereby improving image quality. Ultimately, we will create advertising banners. Everything will be generated by artificial intelligence. I just hope that people will be at the center of this process. They run it instead of a black box algorithm.

Bandholz: Where can people sign up for Flair and follow you?

Friedman: The platform is Flair.ai. You can add me on LinkedIn or follow me on X, @mickeyxfriedman.