Duo make room for AI to crack £700bn homewares market

HOME interiors marketplace Fy! sounds like somewhere tech buzzwords go to breed: it gobbles up social content and uses that, alongside machine learning and a vast vault of data, to give shoppers a personalised experience that lures them to spend more money.

- Lucy Tobin

An AI art gizmo on the site lets you make your own home prints, while its “rooms” feature sees users snap their room and upload it to Fy!’s generative AI tool to see their home transformed into, say, Barbiecore or boho — “like an interior designer in their pocket,” and then buy the products. Some 250,000 rooms have been generated on the site since its launch three months ago.

Fy!’s co-founder Tom Beverley has been running a “very data , and machine-learning-led business” since its launch in 2017. He says it is more “of a tech and marketing company than a retail business — there isn’t off-the-shelf technology that’s doing what we’re trying to do, our engineers built it all.

“Where sites like Amazon use purchase data to suggest you buy something again, our feed ‘learns’ what customers want — our approach is you are what you shop. If someone likes a particular grey Scandinavian product and adds it to their wishlist, then our site, app and emails will start sending you grey Scandi products.”