Startup interview: Julian Eckerle, Co-founder, autoRetouch
RTIH gets the lowdown on autoRetouch, an AI powered image editing platform for fashion and lifestyle brands that recently secured seed funding of €3.2 million, with European apparel retailer Breuninger leading the investment.
RTIH: Tell us about autoRetouch
JE: autoRetouch is expanding the possibilities in digital image editing.
We’ve set out to change the paradigm of what’s possible in automated image editing in order to help anyone create beautiful product images while saving time and money.
We are focused on using AI to enable bulk processing of non-creative edits on many images at once to equip customers with the means of fulfilling the demands of the e-commerce world, not replacing creative work.
Creativity is something uniquely human and we celebrate that. Customers always retain creative control about their final image outcomes.
Where we can help is by moving the heavy lifting, the stuff that nobody really wants to do, but everybody has to do, like removing backgrounds, editing basic skin, defining new backgrounds directly to our cloud-based AI frictionlessly.
RTIH: What was the inspiration behind setting the company up?
JE: The underlying technology for product image editing hasn’t evolved to cope with the scale of the internet.
I worked for many years at Adobe and so did Alex, one of my co-founders.
After spending a long time in tech, he found himself working for an innovative German luxury fashion retailer where he built the data science department, which ultimately became the autoRetouch founding team.
autoRetouch brings the power of cloud and AI to the table in order to democratise the ability to create beautiful product images at the scale of the internet.
RTIH: What has been the industry reaction thus far?
JE: The company has just turned one year old; the product has been in market for less than six months. The initial reactions from early customers, press and the overall industry has been very positive.
Our ability to seamlessly integrate the product into existing ways of working by offering an industry leading PSD file export for example is a very powerful way of bringing the technology into established processes.
Nonetheless, it’s an entirely new way of looking at image editing, which means that there’s a lot of necessary learning, trial, error and dedication involved for people to fully grasp the magnitude of the industry change that the software enables.
RTIH: What has been your biggest challenge/setback?
JE: As a startup from Stuttgart, Germany that has set out to tackle a global challenge, it’s been challenging to compensate for the lack of the “Silicon Valley Network Effect” that many companies founded in the Valley can use to jumpstart their business.
An additional challenge surely has been entering the market during the Covid crisis, where the appetite for disruptive technologies has slowed a little bit in 2020 as the industry navigated a lot of uncertainty.
RTIH: What are the biggest challenges facing the omnichannel retail sector right now?
JE: The ongoing move to e-commerce has drastically accelerated due to the Covid crisis and become a forcing function for many stationary retailers (particularly SMBs) to invest in finally bringing their businesses online.
I believe this is and will remain the biggest challenge for omnichannel retail for the foreseeable future, since consumer behaviour has been lastingly altered to prefer online over offline shopping. This means that anyone in retail will need to think online first going forward.
There is a race to digitise the entire supply chain for selling online and lots of education still to be done to enable anyone to participate in the online economy.
RTIH: What's the best question about your company or the market asked of you recently by a.) an investor and b.) a customer?
JE: Why did your product not exist 18 months ago?
RTIH: What can we expect to see from you over the next 12 months?
JE: We’re expanding across various dimensions. People can expect more use cases covered by us, like the just released ghost mannequin feature.
We will also be able to cover any kind of product image (expanding from just fashion and lifestyle images right now) within our platform over the next 12 months.
We’ll continue innovating around our industry-leading PSD export and API in order to enable seamless integration into our customers process landscape and we will broaden our digital distribution footprint significantly by building plugins for e-commerce, and other third-party software.
We want to be as close as possible to the source of our customers' challenges and thus we need to be in all environments where their product images live and might require changes.