New Balance to use AI at NY fashion week to find unfashionable people

New Balance will put cameras around a booth in New York City to scan the streets in order to find people who look unique or different to the norm.

It’s part of a marketing campaign called “Be The Exception,” according to a report on Fast Company, and people it identifies as looking different will be offered a free pair of its $89.95 Fresh Foam Cruz Nubuck sneakers on Monday, the start of New York fashion week.

New Balance worked with agency VML to scan crowds of people collect data about fashion trends in the weeks running up to the New York event, but the cameras around the booth in Soho will use machine learning to find anomalies to these trends.

New Balance called this “real time exception spotting” in a statement emailed to CNBC. It does not use facial recognition technology and data will be anonymized and aggregated, and the company might use the information to inform its new products, Fast Company reports.

When fashion week comes to town, trendsetters wear their best outfits in the hope of featuring on the street style pages of glossy magazines and of course on Instagram. But New Balance wants to find people going against those trends.

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*