Empowering Fashion Apparel Companies
Interview with Dip Majumder, founder and CEO of Neural Trend based in Chicago, IL.
Neural Trend empowers fashion apparel companies to design better and faster through Big Data and AI. Using cutting edge technologies, Neural Trend offers unparalleled data analytics in record time, equipping clients with the power to match product design with market demand, quickly and accurately.
Can you tell me a bit about yourself? Where did you grow up and how did you end up in the US?
I was born in a tiny town called Darjeeling. My mom was a pediatrician, and back in the 80s- 90s, she used to work on fuzzy logic. It’s a form of what people call AI now. She used to study how a particular disease grows within a specific community. My dad was an engineer, so sometimes, I think, I had no other way but to go into coding. That’s what I have been doing for the last 14+ years.
I got my first master’s in Computer Science back in 2006 from USC. Upon graduation, I had two options: to either join a large corporation or work for a nonprofit. I took the nonprofit route and spent three years there. I knew that money would come later. I wasn’t worried about that. It was vital for me to engage with the community rather than to accumulate wealth. I worked for a non-profit for three years, and then I jumped into a medium-sized company. Google just launched Android back then, and I was one of the guys who took the Android SDK and NDK to build an ERP system off of it. It’s a massive deal for that company, but I was one of those guys geeking out on that app. Then, my third big project was focused on making predictions in aviation. That project took about five years of my time, but nowadays, it’s used in most airports in the United States, Australia, and the UK keeping everyone safe, so I think it was worth the ride.
At what point did you decide to leave a full-time job and start something on your own?
In 2016, I decided to take the plunge and start something on my own. The company was called Locale Vine. It was a very novel idea based on grocery delivery and food consumption. Imagine having your refrigerator filled with foods, just the way you want based on that moment. Your overall mood changes based on the daily circumstances: you might have had a bad interaction with a boss or a happy moment with friends. Imagine someone just comes and puts the right amount of food in your refrigerator based on your mood. You don’t need to buy anything. You don’t have to worry about what to have for lunch or dinner. After about two years in, we realized it wasn’t working, and we were ahead of our time. I learned that tech in itself is not going to solve the problem. You need to have the right set of customers. You need to go out there and sell. Tech, by itself, doesn’t sell.
What did you do differently when you started working on Neural Trend — your current startup?
When I founded Neural Trend in January of 2019, I spent a reasonable amount of time in customer discovery, reaching and engaging with Polsky Center community. I was in the Polsky incubator last year. It helped me build a team and gave Neural Trend a home. The next step for me was NVC, and now we are in the Polsky accelerator program. Nowadays, most of my hours go into sales. Neural Trend is on a mission to help retailers design products that maximize sales while reducing their operation time and cost.
Where did the idea for Neural Trend come from? What have been the initial challenges for you?
My concept with Neural Trend is based on neural networks and human perceptions. I have a four-year-old, and she has an exciting way of buying things. She doesn’t watch much television, but she would buy based on what her friends and teachers are saying and wearing. That’s when I realized: Why not use the trends to make useful predictions in the industry? The challenge is when you tell a retailer or store owner, “Hey, I can help you predict what your customers are going to buy.” The intuitive thought they have: “ I’ve been doing this for 30 years. Why do I need you?”. Convincing a person who has been doing something successfully for many, many years is hard.
For example, we were piloting with a small boutique here in Chicago, and many predictions we provided actually came true. We predicted and suggested the ditsy floral pattern and smock dress last year in September for the boutique to be able to make an order in February, 2020. That pattern indeed turned out to be widely popular this summer. We are engaging retailers who have an in-house data science team. Those companies usually believe in data. They believe that if they don’t rely on data, they’re not going to survive.
Can you tell me about a time when you had to pivot Neural Trend’s direction?
Some of our initial customers were small boutique stores. However, we quickly learned that they relied mostly on their gut instincts rather than data. It was a hard sell. So we pivoted to medium to large retailers. They are using our training data in meaningful ways. For example, they say: “Okay, I can see that this blue and floral pattern is trending, and in my inventory, I have this amount of products. I will promote this by putting this on the homepage or putting it on the Facebook ad.”
What impact did the pandemic have on your business?
The start of COVID-19 was especially challenging. There are 160 women’s apparel retailers here in Chicago, and we engaged 12 of them to start using our platform by February 2020. By March, 100% of them closed their stores. Permanently. These store owners were not tech-savvy; they were running these boutique shops because they enjoyed doing so. The technology was not something that they wanted to deal with. But when the pandemic started, they knew that the world was about to change. So they just closed their doors and retired. We lost all those customers in one go, so that impact was a hard one.
How do you continue being excited about your daily routine and the work?
It has been a year and a half since I have been working on Neural Trend and never have any two days been the same for me. It’s not a routine. What’s interesting is that it’s not just learning new things. It’s also unlearning a lot of things. When you open up to a business, you’re solving a problem differently. You just look at things from the lens of so many different people. One of my teammates is a nuclear engineer by education, and she’s a product manager at Neural Trend. She’s looking at the problems we solve through very different lenses. We always learn from each other. That keeps me excited.
What was important for you in building the right team?
My life has always been focused on creating a value system for myself and those around me. It was never about the next big bonus or immediate returns. It was still a question of: How can I create something that makes a community a little better? That drives my whole mission at Neural Trend. That’s also how I was building out the team from the ground up, and that’s what I consider my most significant success in the last year — finding amazing like-minded teammates.
My core team — we are all very close to each other. We are all driven by a shared value system. Doing it right by the community and environment: we genuinely believe in our mission and creating value. All three of us, the founders, are immigrants from across the globe — Serbia, China and India. We all come from different backgrounds and bring various perspectives, but we share the same belief system. Our CTO is a financial trader by profession, our COO is a supply chain optimizer, and I’m a techie. The folks who have joined us after that, all have a similar mindset and motivation. It has been a fantastic journey.
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