“The metaverse is a big fat distraction,” declared Julie Bornstein, CEO of mobile-first fashion marketplace The Yes.
Sitting in a stuffy conference room at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino’s convention center in Las Vegas, Bornstein is on the frontlines of how shoppers, especially younger ones, are buying goods online. And right now, she said with a pointed shrug of her shoulders, “our customer doesn’t care” about meta anything.
Bornstein’s shopping app and site, which she co-founded with former Google engineer Amit Aggarwal in 2018 and launched in 2020, shows its users products that they are most likely to buy based on previous product recommendations that they’ve said no or yes to. The algorithm she and her team have developed can identify 500 or more characteristics of a single garment, from its shape to which influential person has been photographed wearing it, and match the right item with the right buyer. But none of it has anything to do with virtual reality or other aspects of the metaverse.
Nevermind the metaverse hype that overtook last month’s South by Southwest conference. About 1200 miles west, at the annual Shoptalk conference in Las Vegas, e-commerce executives were having none of it. Bornstein was hardly the only CEO who brushed off the term “metaverse,” which has become shorthand for describing the immersive internet of the future. For proponents of the technology, including Meta Platforms, which had a small presence at the conference, this was not an auspicious sign.
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