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Fanatics launches Shop the Look powered by OpenAI to help fans complete their outfits
IA en un minuto newsroom · Editor: Jon Elgezabal
In 30 seconds
Fanatics has revamped Shop the Look, the store feature that puts together full outfits, and OpenAI models now run it. When a team jersey is opened, the page offers in-stock pieces that go with it, and the suggestions change daily along with the catalog. The tools were made with Codex and, when trialled with roughly 30,000 MLB items, engagement rose by 10%.
Fanatics, the digital sports merchandise platform, has launched a new version of Shop the Look, its feature that recommends complete outfits, now running on OpenAI models. OpenAI itself announced it on Monday, October 26, and says it is working with Fanatics to improve the experience for fans.
When someone looks up their team's jersey, the product page offers matching outfits made of items currently in stock, from that team and in the style they are after. The feature is already up on many websites in the Fanatics network, among them Fanatics.com and the official online stores of the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL.
According to OpenAI, its models build the recommendations from enriched product data plus team and inventory information. Fanatics' own merchandising rules make sure the suggested items go together and make sense, and the outfits are updated every day as the catalog changes.
Using Codex, OpenAI's coding agent, engineers from OpenAI and Fanatics built custom tools to enrich catalog data, find items that go together, assess the recommendations and generate outfits for each product. Trying the system on 50 products took under a day and, after a couple of days of adjustments, Fanatics signed off on the minimum viable product the same week. In tests on roughly 30,000 MLB products, the new version achieved 10% more engagement than the old one. OpenAI gives no further detail on those tests and does not say which models it uses.
Fanatics already uses ChatGPT Work, the version of ChatGPT for the workplace, and Codex in its corporate, commerce, collectibles, and betting and gaming businesses.
Why it matters · analysis and opinion
Recommendations of the you-may-also-like kind have been around for years; what is new here is that a language model puts whole outfits together and a layer of the retailer's own rules filters out what does not fit. That split is the interesting part for any online shop: the AI proposes, but the business keeps control over what is offered. The other message lies in how it was built: with a coding agent, the team went from idea to something approved in a matter of days. What remains unknown is what really decides profitability: whether that higher engagement turns into more sales, how much it costs to keep the system running and how it works outside a catalog as tidy as one of team jerseys.
Official source: OpenAI · Written with the help of AI: how we make the news
