Shapermint is among the growing list of marketers hoping to cash in on the hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI), and so far, its bets have shown signs of paying off.
The shapewear retailer, which is owned by Trafilea Tech E-commerce Group, has leveraged its parent company’s proprietary AI advertising tool, Altair, to streamline content production and help fuel over $300 million in projected 2024 revenue. The tool, spearheaded by Massimiliano Tirocchi, CMO of Trafilea, has also made Shapermint’s ad creative tests significantly more effective.
Tirocchi, recently named one of the most innovative CMOs of 2024 by Business Insider, said that using Altair to test and power user-generated content (UGC) ads developed by its creator program, Shapermint Creators, has also been key to helping the company gain new customers. However, finding success using the tech has required a deeper understanding that extends beyond the surface level, Tirocchi said.
“It is not just a matter of using AI, it is using it the right way,” the exec said.
Shapermint bills itself as a size-inclusive online apparel retailer offering shapewear items including shorts, undergarments and swimwear. Launched in 2018, the company has grown to more than 10 million customers and has sold over 22 million units, according to the company.
The rising brand, which invests around $70 million per year across digital paid media platforms — Meta, Google, YouTube, Pinterest and TikTok — conducts between 100 and 200 unique tests per month on its UGC advertising, and that’s where the Altair AI tool has been most beneficial. The retailer leverages Altair through its creator program, which encompasses 800 content creators and ambassadors who develop UGC utilizing the scripts and storyboards that Altair creates.
Altair sifts through patterns behind Shapermint’s top-performing ads, analyzes the script and understands the type of storytelling that allows the ad to work, Tirocchi said. After the tool conducts the research, it creates the “personalized” advertisement based on how the company sells the products.
“It takes patterns from the video ads internally and externally and creates a storyboard,” Tirocchi said.
Shaping up for success
Altair has helped Shapermint significantly reduce the time and cost to find winning ads, cutting content creation time from three weeks to three days, on average. While that could help reduce Shapermint’s overall ad and content creation budget, the retailer has simultaneously been investing more on advertising.
“We have higher effectiveness and better results…and better production,” Tirocchi said. “It allows us to find more ads that we can scale across channels to have a better return.”
Shapermint’s sales are growing by 35% each year, and the company will now be able to sustain that growth with the support of Altair, Tirocchi said. The company acquires 200,000 new customers per month. While other marketers could benefit from the AI tool, Trafilea executives intend to use it within their own brands and not make it available commercially.
Among other perks of its use of Altair, Shapermint is able to hone in on more localized contact creation. The retailer utilizes 30 to 50 local content creators that it taps more regularly than its network of 800 to create “much more real” content, Tirocchi said. Now that those creators are utilizing Altair to tap into local language and slang of various countries, Shapermint has expanded beyond U.S. creators to include individuals from the U.K., Canada and Australia.
The only glitch in AI is that the technology — while very effective for developing images — lacks in terms of creating videos.
“It is still not of the quality that is needed,” Tirocchi said. “We know it is going to get there.”
For other marketers to fully benefit from AI ad tools, Tirocchi suggests they understand the fundamentals behind how AI works to properly implement it. Marketers must first “get really good at creating content,” and then integrate AI tools into the entire company workflow.
“It’s a technology that won’t go away,” Tirocchi said. “They must embrace it and make it part of their daily lives.”
