Mickey Friedman co-founded Flair.ai in 2022, a year after graduating from the University of Chicago. The company, which has raised $5 million in seed funding, uses artificial intelligence to perfect product photos and provide virtual scenes and entire setups.
She says the process will revolutionize e-commerce photography by significantly reducing the cost of photography while improving quality.
In a recent conversation, she spoke about the rise of visual AI, the need for human intervention, and more. The full audio is embedded below. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Eric Bandholz: Who on earth are you?
Mickey Friedman: I run a company called Flair, which was founded in 2023. We develop AI tools. Product Photosvisualization, animation and much more. We are trying to streamline the photography process into a much lower cost and easier to use virtual studio.
We have a team of 5. We currently have over 1 million users.
We start with your existing product photos, we color correct them, preserve the text and provide you with an entire virtual scene. Preserving branding and text is important to us.
I was an early participant in the AI art scene. I was interested in marketing and photography, but I was drawn to the creative process of using AI models to create art. The initial process was to take a bit of text, Image generationThere are still features like that out there, like Midjourney, but e-commerce companies want to maintain their own brand and assets and control the visual placement of the scene.
Bandholz: How are tradespeople using your tools so far?
Friedman: Landing page images and Organic Social Posts It’s extremely popular. We’re trying to define the creative process of photography. A lot of AI tools remove the human from the process, but we want to do the opposite – empower our customers to execute whatever vision they have in mind.
The people who are drawn to Flair are often people at the intersection of ecommerce and creativity – in-house design teams and agencies – they intuitively understand our platform.
Flair is full of storyboards. We have had clients who had a vision for their dream photoshoot but couldn’t execute it due to the sheer amount of coordination and costs involved. Flair allows you to upload your raw product photos to Canvas, find the props you need, and virtually recreate your photoshoot right on the platform.
Bandholz: Flair seems ready to scale up.
Friedman: This is a huge market. We want every brand in the world to use us in some way. Smaller brands on a budget can migrate their photo shoots, but larger brands with more room to maneuver need better tools.
Either way, as long as businesses need photography, Flair will remain a part of their workflow, and that’s our goal.
We are moving into verticals, for example, if you are a fashion brand, you can put a sweater on a virtual human model, and if it’s a product commercial, it reduces the cost.
We want to get as much traction as possible with smaller brands, but while it might be a little on the high-end side, it’s never going to be too expensive — much less than $500 a month.
Over time, the AI model will improve and the quality of the images will improve. Eventually, it will even create banner ads. All of this. AI-generatedMy only hope is that humans will be at the center of that process, humans directing it, not black box algorithms.
Bandholz: Where can I subscribe and follow Flair?
Friedman: This platform is FlareYou can add me LinkedIn Or follow me on X, translation:.
