How Shapermint’s proprietary AI ad tool is fueling profits

Shapermint is among the many growing list of marketers hoping to money in on the hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI), and thus far, its bets have shown signs of paying off. 

The shapewear retailer, which is owned by Trafilea Tech E-commerce Group, has leveraged its parent company’s proprietary AI promoting tool, Altair, to streamline content production and help fuel over $300 million in projected 2024 revenue. The tool, spearheaded by Massimiliano Tirocchi, CMO of Trafilea, has also made Shapermint’s ad creative tests significantly more practical. 

Tirocchi, recently named one of the revolutionary CMOs of 2024 by Business Insider, said that using Altair to check and power user-generated content (UGC) ads developed by its creator program, Shapermint Creators, has also been key to helping the corporate gain recent customers. However, finding success using the tech has required a deeper understanding that extends beyond the surface level, Tirocchi said. 

“It is not only a matter of using AI, it is using it the fitting way,” the exec said. 

Shapermint bills itself as a size-inclusive online apparel retailer offering shapewear items including shorts, undergarments and swimwear. Launched in 2018, the corporate has grown to greater than 10 million customers and has sold over 22 million units, in line with the corporate.

The rising brand, which invests around $70 million per yr across digital paid media platforms — Meta, Google, YouTube, Pinterest and TikTok — conducts between 100 and 200 unique tests per 30 days on its UGC promoting, and that’s where the Altair AI tool has been most useful. The retailer leverages Altair through its creator program, which encompasses 800 content creators and ambassadors who develop UGC utilizing the scripts and storyboards that Altair creates. 

Altair sifts through patterns behind Shapermint’s top-performing ads, analyzes the script and understands the form of storytelling that permits the ad to work, Tirocchi said. After the tool conducts the research, it creates the “personalized” commercial based on how the corporate sells the products. 

“It takes patterns from the video ads internally and externally and creates a storyboard,” Tirocchi said.

Shaping up for achievement

Altair has helped Shapermint significantly reduce the time and price to seek out winning ads, cutting content creation time from three weeks to a few days, on average. While that might help reduce Shapermint’s overall ad and content creation budget, the retailer has concurrently been investing more on promoting. 

“We have higher effectiveness and higher results…and higher production,” Tirocchi said. “It allows us to seek out more ads that we are able to scale across channels to have a greater return.” 

Shapermint’s sales are growing by 35% every year, and the corporate will now have the ability to sustain that growth with the support of Altair, Tirocchi said. The company acquires 200,000 recent customers per 30 days. While other marketers may benefit from the AI tool, Trafilea executives intend to make use of it inside their very own brands and never make it available commercially.

Among other perks of its use of Altair, Shapermint is capable of hone in on more localized contact creation. The retailer utilizes 30 to 50 local content creators that it taps more usually than its network of 800 to create “way more real” content, Tirocchi said. Now that those creators are utilizing Altair to tap into local language and slang of varied countries, Shapermint has expanded beyond U.S. creators to incorporate individuals from the U.K., Canada and Australia.

The only glitch in AI is that the technology — while very effective for developing images — lacks by way of creating videos. 

“It is still not of the standard that is needed,” Tirocchi said. “We understand it is going to get there.”