A London-headquartered start-up founded in 2022, Truss, is cataloguing the world’s clothes, or at least the share of it produced by fashion houses.
As Truss sees things, its product is useful for e-commerce and resale, for fashion brands themselves and for marketplaces, but also for insurers, which require proper appraisals before they cover items like handbags and rare sneakers (to cite Truss’s own examples). Truss promises to provide “accurate product valuations from real market data so that the correct premiums can be set.” For brands, the company promises to eliminate the need for a staff of data-entry clerks, saving manhours and payroll, while for e-commerce, it promises fast and sure product identification and depth of description.
The idea behind Truss resembles the idea behind Zotero, a program ubiquitous in academic circles that will skim reference data off the internet and populate the fields of a bibliography at the click of a mouse. Truss works off pictures, feeding them to an AI that, as far as we can infer, matches them to pictures on the internet. According to Business of Fashion (BoF), the AI scrapes data from resale websites – no doubt with some criterion for minimal matching through cross-checks.
The Truss app – available only for iPhone – provides entry into the Truss archive, with its catalog of 30,000 items sorted by year of release. Switch off the “for sale” mode, and the app will offer a “curated archive of fashion history,” with means to search for “similar items.” “Explore feed” will curate the catalogue by user taste as demonstrated by app use.
Truss has secured support from Selfridges, the circular fashion marketplace Depop and the online fashion-box retailer Heat. According to BoF, it has also secured a grant worth £1 million (€1.18m) from the government agency Innovate UK, although we have been unable to verify this.
