PHX Reporter

Anabel Maldonado has dreams of making PSYKHE the wave of the future.

The e-commerce startup is already quickly making a name for itself by combining AI and psychology to impress shoppers across Arizona. With Maldonado as the founder, the company works its magic by making product recommendations based on the user’s personality profile.

Already, the company has secured affiliate partnerships with the likes of big-name online retailers Moda Operandi, MyTheresa, LVMH’s platform 24S and 11 Honoré. Future plans also include a launch into the world of fashion e-commerce, along with a B2B strategy to scale its technology to other consumer verticals.

“In an overcrowded market of multibrand and monobrand e-commerce players, users are overwhelmed by having to visit each one by one and then apply lots of manual filtering to navigate through the standard merchandising to find something they like,” Maldonado told the Arizona Business Daily. “So far, fashion platforms’ attempts at personalization ... have failed due to a reliance on one-dimensional data.

PSYKHE aims to make all that simple.

"We’ve created an aggregator that pulls product from all leading fashion retailers, all returned in a personalized order, in one place," Maldonado said. "Every single user sees a different storefront that becomes increasingly personalized.”

The company’s team of data scientists and developers spent a year training AI models how to pick up on surface details, many of which can go into the final psychological profile that’s developed.

Maldonado hints that the market for her creation could be endless.

“Even those who claim not to care about fashion make aesthetic decisions every day,” she said. “So I sought to change how we think about clothes and aesthetics, instead of putting consumers through an endless cycle of trends and social validation-seeking, creating waste and confusion, I decided to devote my time to the burgeoning field of fashion psychology – why we wear what we wear.”

Maldonado says that she was able to get her project off the ground by receiving her first $100,000 in seed money in 2019 from investor Carmen Busquets.

“With my first hire, my lead data scientist, we quickly established that the Big 5 scoring framework infused into a set of machine learning models would be the best way forward,” Maldonado added.

To date, approximately 10,000 users have signed on to a waiting list for a service that starts with the user taking a 3-minute personality test that ultimately comes to make up part of their profile page.

“Self-discovery is a significant value of the brand,” Maldonado added. “So, we will update users’ profile pages with fresh insights about themselves, and they can always see their personality information better.”

Finally, Maldonado said the London-headquartered company plans to make money to start through its affiliate partnership model, where it can make up to 25% on each sale.

“PSYKHE’s estimated addressable market for its tech-place platform is $12 billion,” Maldonado said. “In terms of the B2B product for consumer verticals we are working on, the global fashion e-commerce market is $585 billion, and interiors, one vertical we will be focusing on, was $575 million in 2018 but expected to grow and is expected to grow annually by 5.3%.”