Modiste X Data Scientist
Preet Gandhi Kapoor, a Data Scientist turned Modiste, is the ultimate maverick at the helm of Svelte Couture.
After turning down an admission offer by NID Ahmedabad, she switched fields to pursue IT engineering in undergrad. She moved to NYC for her MS in Data Science from NYU Center for Data Science. While interning at Apple for Tim Cook’s executive team, she worked with the VP to use AI for improved customer experience. Her capstone project with Spotify+Warner Brothers used AI to predict which tracks are likely to become hits depending on intrinsic acoustic features & social media factors. Upon graduation, she worked 2 years at Nvdia with the NYC financial services team catering to the CTOs and directors of Wall Street banks & hedge funds. Her work centered around Natural Language Processing, Automatic Speech Recognition & AI Chatbots for improved customer interaction in the world of finance. She experienced how AI algorithms were transforming diverse industries and kept conceptualizing their potential applications in her field of passion : fashion. Some of her innovative ideas were published in the renowned journal, KDNuggets, where her article, Data Science in Fashion, won the March 2018 Silver Badge.
Shopping in Soho was therapy for Preet through the struggles of a challenging masters, internship and job . It was in these districts she noticed how international High-End and Fast Fashion brands sold products manufactured in India at exorbitant markups. Ironically, India lacked such indigenous brands which would use premium local fabrics & rival the global fashion taste while remaining affordable to the average Indian female. The best products are first exported, labelled as foreign brands then imported and sold back at a large markup making them expensive for many. Sadly, the market is also flooded with cheap China-made goods contributing to the trade deficit even though India has the same manufacturing and labour resources. Her bold decision to leave a high paying job and move to India to address this market gap was cemented by her belief in the potential of the rich human capital and textiles.
The lockdown had our AI professional turn into a self-taught seamstress where she would create attires reflecting her sartorial preferences. Our modiste's personal taste is exemplified by feminine, romantic and classic silhouettes whose elegance transcends time. To her feminity is power and the way you dress represents your personality. Experimenting with web-crawlers, mining elegant designs from fashion archives, using social media APIs to see product demand were ways her tech expertise were applied to her hobby giving birth to the preliminary idea of Svelte Couture.
Svelte is her unconventional dream manifesting to reality; creating a couture brand made affordable and sustainable by the power of Artificial Intelligence. Her creative flair and logical acumen synergistically create the next revolution in AI-powered fashion.
Preet Gandhi Kapoor
