The feature aims to solve a problem common to large online retailers: customers overwhelmed by choice. Justin Tsai, chief product officer for Fanatics Commerce, said the company's rapid growth, it manufactures more than 45 million items each year for sale in over 180 countries, left shoppers spending more than 30 minutes per session on average as they sorted through thousands of new products released weekly.
"One problem we just kept seeing was that our customers come to our sites, and we operate hundreds of these sites … their challenges are that they're always trying to look through our very large catalog to figure out what they can buy," Tsai said.
Traditional curation methods, such as photo shoots and stylized outfits, have lead times that struggle to keep pace with Fanatics' rapidly expanding product pool and the need for quickly released championship gear. Random suggestions risk team alignment errors.
"Nobody who is a Los Angeles Dodgers fan wants to be matched with a San Francisco Giants item … team and player alignment is extremely important in our world," Tsai said.
Rosemary DeAragon, head of industry GTM at OpenAI, said the personalization challenge in retail is "an age-old problem." She noted that while e-commerce gave retailers new ways to understand customers, through purchase history, location, or account data, those efforts still sometimes miss the mark.
"In the past we were trying to stitch together something that would be good to show a customer," DeAragon said. "With AI, you can do more deterministic matching to do personalization in this next-level way."
Fanatics founder and CEO Michael Rubin said earlier this month that the company's commerce business will exceed $7 billion in revenue this year, while its collectibles business, including Topps trading cards, will generate roughly $5.5 billion, according to a CNBC interview. Team merchandise remains Fanatics' largest revenue source.
After rolling out the "Shop the Look" feature, Tsai said there was a 10% increase in views of recommended items and that the suggestions helped shoppers have "more conviction" about their purchases by seeing how items fit with other team gear.
The partnership is part of OpenAI's broader push into shopping. The company had previously experimented with in-chat purchases but is now shifting to working directly with retailers to create dedicated apps within ChatGPT, according to CNBC reporting.
DeAragon said that while in-person try-ons and curated looks will remain important, AI integration in this area shows a "really big opportunity to enhance the existing experience."