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Sydney-based premium fashion house THDR Group plans to make in-person design and fittings a thing of the past with the launch of Neuono, an app that the company describes as the world’s first AI-led fashion brand.
Neuono was born from THDR’s existing technology – the PocketTailor AI sizing app - which the company introduced when it was established in 2021 along with its menswear label Theodore – a custom-tailored brand that was created to provide consumers access to affordable luxury.
THDR, which was founded by Sean Fagan and Timothy Aquino, is now leveraging Neuono’s advanced technology to accelerate its direct-to-consumer model for the Theodore brand which has been growing at 50 per cent a year over the past three years.
It also plans to grow its custom AI-generated fashion operations to create accessible designs for the broader market through the Neuono app, which has already notched up 10,000 downloads within three months of launch.
“We gained really good traction when we first launched and more recently a couple of weeks ago during New York Fashion Week where we got a great reception,” Fagan tells Business News Australia.
“There is nothing else like this out there at the moment.”
Fagan, the technology lead for the group, says curiosity about the app is also reflected in THDR’s Neuone launch video from New York Fashion Week which has generated more than 2.7 million views on YouTube in a little over two weeks.
Employing the company’s proprietary generative AI engine, SenseThread, Neuono is seen as a bold step forward to enable “anyone, anywhere to create made-to-measure garments without the need for in-person fittings or store visits”.
Neuono has been crafted to design a range of wear from luxury fashion for men and women, to outerwear, T shirts and jeans.
“Neuono is a hyper personalised made-to-measure fashion design at scale,” says Fagan.
The technology builds on THDR’s original technology, PocketTailor, which is simply a body measurement app for personalised sizing.
The Neuono technology, combined with SenseThread, has taken this a step further to add custom generative AI design into the mix.
“We couldn’t have done what we are doing now even a year ago because of the advancements in AI,” says Fagan.
Fagan points out that Neuono has been created to solve two of fashion’s biggest challenges, namely poor fit and overproduction.
“By designing everything to order and to fit, we reduce waste and completely reshape the customer experience,” he says.
“Through this technology, the fashion possibilities become limitless. For a single jacket, Neuono can pull from over 70 billion combinations of fabrics, linings, threads and buttons. That level of personalisation just hasn’t existed in ready-to-wear fashion until now.”
Powered by AI models from OpenAI and Google, alongside additional propriety models, datasets and engineering developed by the group, Neuono blends 3D body mapping with smart styling algorithms to generate any type of garment, from formalwear to everyday pieces.
“If you put something in there that is not on trend or not working for you, the AI will steer the design towards what is best for you based on fashion theory, colour theory and analysis,” says Fagan.
Users can enter any request and the AI analyses global trends, personal preferences and characteristics, along with geographic and demographic information, to create a custom design, presented through AI-generated images and detailed descriptions.
Through a smartphone selfie, the Neuono app scans the body to generate precise measurements and suggests personalised garments with styles, fabrics and fits all based on the user’s personal preferences.
Once the design is finalised, the custom garment is produced and shipped directly to the customer, a feature that Fagan says is critical to making high-end custom fashion readily accessible.
“Neuono streamlines the entire process of creating custom clothing,” says Fagan.
“We’ve always believed there had to be a better way to bring made-to-measure into the modern age. So, we built one intuitive enough for anyone to use, powerful enough to deliver high-end results.”
THDR says the average price for a custom garment is $400, although prices vary depending on fabric and design selection.
For the moment, THDR plans to maintain the direct-to-consumer model using Neuono, although the technology has created strong interest in the fashion world with many international players exploring how they could adapt the technology for their own products.
“We have gone the direct-to-consumer rout, building our brand and our technology, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a B2B play here as well,” says Fagan.
“We already have received pretty healthy demand from other fashion brands but at the moment we are focusing on the consumer play because there is a large addressable market there alone.”
Despite the surging interest in Neuono, Fagan isn’t calling an end to fashion design as we know it.
“We think this is just an additional way for people to buy clothes,” he says.
“We will always have designers who use their own identity and their own creativity that is their brand. People will always buy into that.
“There are also people who create very custom and bespoke items. What we are creating is a third way where AI is used to design fashion.”
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