Rather than feel discouraged by the tech world’s disinterest in luxury, she decided to seize her company’s opportunity to target a massive, underserved market. The start-up builds custom tools for retailers, like customer-facing shopping assistants and back-end data optimizers, from the grocery store chain Sprouts to the multibrand retailers like Nordstrom. Looking ahead, Mostafazadeh is hoping her company “makes it so that what happened to the neighbor on the north doesn’t happen to the neighbor on the west,” she said, gesturing to Macy’s a few blocks away, lest it suffer the same bankruptcy fate as retailers like Ssense, Matches, and Saks Global.
You can probably think of a couple of pain points that Mostafazadeh’s technology—which she prefers to call “augmented intelligence”—aims to address. Many of these pain points can be found online, where shoppers can waste hours on an endless scroll without making a single purchase. (Natural language searches like “black loafers under $500 with ruching at the toe stitch only” are well within the realm of what’s technologically possible, but far from the reality you’d currently find on most e-commerce sites.)
In person is more challenging. I recounted to Mostafazadeh the time I’d gone into a department store seeking a pair of Staud Wally boots, which it would seem I and every other woman in America had coveted after seeing them on Kendall Jenner. They were sold out. I asked a sales associate if he could recommend any similar alternatives, overwhelmed by the sprawling shoe floor. He told me he could not, so I left the building and the store lost my business.
Mostafazadeh shook her head. “That is precisely the problem we’re solving.” She continued, “If a store associate has access to our AI, without you even knowing” that associate should have been able to instantly access information about me and my purchase history as well as their current inventory to guide me to the perfect pair of boots that were not too pointy, not too tall, but just right. (As for whether they’d ask for my personal information from me directly or if it would be detected via some kind of Minority Report–style personalization system, I wasn’t entirely clear.)
Geoffroy van Raemdonck, who has been tasked with navigating Saks Global out of its post-bankruptcy tailspin as its new CEO, serves as an adviser to the company. “I believe AI has a huge potential to scale white-glove service in luxury and bring efficiencies that can be reinvested in the client experience,” van Raemdonck told me. “The key to capture that value is for the CEO to own the AI agenda.”
Legacy luxury giants have been slow on the uptake of new technologies—something they’re hoping to turn around this year by using AI to resolve supply chain issues, predict coming trends and shifts in consumer demand, and improve customer engagement during every stage of the shopping journey. After a turbulent 2025, a McKinsey report on the state of fashion predicts that the luxury sector will see “modest improvements” this year, in part as a result of those investments.
They’ll have to be careful to walk a fine line between efficiency and cheapness. As my colleague José Criales-Unzueta put it to me, “In a way, automation is the enemy of luxury when it comes to the retail experience, no?”
