The Scoop with Daydream’s Lisa Yamner: On the App’s First Birthday and Funniest Customer Searches

Welcome to the Scoop: a weekly email series in which I quiz fashion insiders on the stories of the week. This will be a way for the Vogue Business community to synthesize and reflect on the latest headlines and get a little inside scoop every Friday.

This week’s guest is Lisa Yamner, co-founder and chief brands officer of Daydream, which is basically ChatGPT for when you are binging Summer House (post scandal) and want to find one of the matching sets Paige DeSorbo wore in a previous season. Or something to that effect.

Before Daydream, Lisa was head of brand partnerships at Pinterest as well as serving as the chief commercial officer at The Yes, Daydream’s oldest sibling (both were founded by fashion exec Julie Bornstein) that was acquired by Pinterest in 2022. She’s also worked for Google and Condé Nast. I met Lisa in May at the Vogue Business Global Summit in France, after she graciously accepted to speak on our AI-themed panel. It was over drinks in Chantilly that she said she would have more news to share later this summer, so this week, we jumped on a call.

Hi Lisa, what’s the scoop?

We just turned one year old, removed the beta from our app and launched an evolution to our Style Passport to include more factors than just brand and size, which was what we started with. We’ve expanded it now to include things like, “What’s a celebrity that inspires you?” to understand more about a user’s personal taste.

I don’t think AI can define taste, but I do think it helps reflect it. As we understood more about the user and the signals that would help us create a more personalized experience, we developed a more nuanced product.

Who is the Daydream user?

It’s not an exact profile. We’ve surpassed 1.5 million shoppers but we’re still learning a lot about [the Daydream user] based on the requests. We get a lot of questions about bachelorette dressing, for example. “I need an outfit that’s Aperol spritz-themed for a bachelorette in Miami,” was one of them. That gives you the 26 to 36-year-old range of girls going to bachelorette parties.

We also have C-suite executives. We had one looking for an outfit for a work event at Grounds For Sculpture, which is a 42-acre sculpture park and arboretum in New Jersey. She wanted “to look polished but match the artistic vibe”, she said. Generally, our customer is somebody who is traveling and has a career.

Is it mostly women?

Yes, it’s about 80% women. We’ve spent most of our energy on developing the women’s product — we’re just starting to spend a little bit more time on men’s. We had a big announcement at Apple’s developer conference in June, which brought an influx of male users.

We published an article about how men are increasingly using Reddit for style advice. And Reddit is positioning itself as an antidote to AI. So that tension is interesting, but more than anything it tells you men need style advice.

My boyfriend says to everyone we meet that he feels Daydream is even better for men than for women. He goes on this whole tangent about how men have less of a sense of how they should be dressing for different occasions and this is the perfect way to get that advice.

Everybody’s life is in photographs all of a sudden. People really care about what they look like and it becomes more obvious when they’re not dressed well. Also dressing is a good shortcut to playing the part, right?