Project Aims

The FashionBrain project is a €2.8m three year project funded by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme. The project is being led by Dr Alessandro Checco and involves several partners from across Europe, including the Beuth University of Applied Sciences, Universite de Fribourg, Zalando SE, Fashwell AG and MonetDB Solutions B.V.

The FashionBrain project aims at combining data from different sources to support different fashion industry players by predicting upcoming fashion trends from social media as well as by providing personalised recommendations and advanced fashion item search to customers.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 732328

More Details

FashionBrain Factsheet

FashionBrain Project Presentation

FashionBrain Project Poster

FashionBrain Project Vision Paper

FashionBrain Project Leaflet

FashionBrain Glossary

FashionBrain Technology

A core business of Europe’s fashion industry is to acquire a deep understanding of customer needs and to predict next trends. Search engines and social networks are often used as a bridge between the customer’s potential purchase decision and the retailer. In order to reinforce Europe’s position in the fashion industry and better exploit its distinctive characteristics e.g., multiple languages, fashion and cultural differences, it is pivotal to reduce its dependence to search engines.

This goal can be achieved by harnessing various data channels that retailers can leverage in order to gain more insight about potential buyers, and on the industry trends as a whole. The main outcome of the FashionBrain project is the improvement of the fashion industry value chain obtained thanks to the creation of novel online shopping experiences, the detection of influencers, and the prediction of upcoming fashion trends. Tangible outcomes will include software, demonstrators, and novel algorithms for a data-driven fashion industry.

The FashionBrain project targets the two main actors of the fashion industry, i.e., the retailers and the customers. We propose to gather and combine the sheer amount of data generated by (emanating from) different fashion industry multisectorial players, starting from manufacturers and distribution networks, to online shops, large retailers, and value-added services companies (e.g., social media analysis, market observers, call centers, press/magazines etc).

The gathered data will be curated, analyzed and used as input for machines learning algorithms. The outcome of the project will benefit retailers by providing novel services to their customers in order to improve their shopping experience and boost their loyalty. For example, a customer will be able to receive personalized recommendations and perform advanced fashion items search by image, complex textual description, etc. Also, a retailer will be able to compose a marketing story about a product that fits the customer’s taste, instead of merely showing an item and its price.

Work Packages & Public Deliverables

The FashionBrain project is structured into 9 Work Packages (WPs) including technical (WP1-6) and administrative (WP7-9) WPs. The list of project deliverables which are open to the public together with the partner leading its work are linked to below.

View work packages & public deliverables