Kumar Rajan, senior vice president of engineering at Aetrex and Larry Schwartz, chief executive officer at Aetrex sat down with Shoshy Ciment, senior business editor of Footwear News at the FN Summit on Tuesday to discuss artificial intelligence and the future of retail footwear, in a discussion presented by Aetrex.
Known industry-wide for its footwear scanner, Aetrex launched its scanner in 2002 and was a pioneer in bringing foot scanners to the consumer market. In the early 2010s, the foot-scanning tech company started using AI to help predict consumer sentiment.
Before the rise of ChatGPT, Schwartz noted that companies used traditional AI for existing content. But now generative AI “takes AI to another level to produce new content.” He observed that while ChatGPT has brought AI to the forefront of the consumer and is associated with AI the most, it’s not the only type of AI companies have used and “has been around us for a long time”.
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Rajan echoed Schwartz’s sentiment and said he sees generative AI as a useful tool with the rapid technological advancements being made. “It can turn an idea into a story. If I have a bunch of shoe designs that Aetrex has made, I can use that to predict and come up with a new design — that could be the starting point for the next shoe we make.”
Aetrex uses its own version of AI called FitAI. Rajan said the technology’s purpose is to “find the best fitting shoes for customers.” When customers use the company’s foot scanner, they are trying on multiple brands — which made Aetrex realize they could use the scanner to train their own AI model. When using the scanner, the AI uses the 3D measurements of the feet to predict the best-fitting shoes that fit an individual’s unique foot shape.
“FitAI was created to solve the problem of online returns,” said Schwartz. “The Brannock device is over 100 years old. A single dimension measurement is a great starting point for someone to grab 4 or 5 shoes and start the fitting process. But it doesn’t work for fitting shoes online. The 30 to 40 percent return rate, depending on the style, is bad for consumers, retailers and the environment.”
In November 2023, the company launched its companion, FitStarter, an AI-powered shoe match-making platform. It uses the measurements from the scanner to match it against the dimensions of the shoes itself. As Aetrex compiles more data, it then migrates the information over to FitGenius, which provides consumers with footwear recommendations both in-store and online.
Schwartz said that a major benefit of foot scanning for retailers is providing a “great in-store experience for consumers” and “capturing an enormous amount of data to help with digital marketing and other areas of developing shoes.”
On the consumer-facing side for those who don’t have an opportunity to go into the store, Aetrex created its SizeRight app — a widget integrated into their partners’ websites — that allows customers to take a photo and scan their feet to generate a shopper’s shoe size for that brand.
The company also owns Foot.com, a portal open to everyone in the footwear retail industry around the globe. The site compiles data from millions of 3D scans of feet and looks at what type of different feet exist in different areas of the world. Rajan predicts that AI will soon be able to create a last automatically.
“We really want everyone to make smarter shoes,” concluded Schwartz.
