For the women who shop the way fashion now expects them to – across cities, often across continents, frequently from designers they will never meet in person – the limitations of the online experience have long been a quiet frustration. Sizing is guesswork. Returns are inevitable. The image on the brand’s site rarely tells you what you actually need to know.

John Imah is closing that gap.

SPREEAI, the New York-based AI fashion-tech company Imah co-founded in 2023, crossed into unicorn territory last year at a $1.5 billion valuation. Its platform is designed to let a shopper see herself, in photorealistic detail, wearing a garment before she buys it. The technology lives white-labelled inside the brands’ own websites and apps. Most customers will never see the SPREEAI name. They will see a try-on tool that has narrowed the gap between the catalogue image and the reflection.

The company’s ambitions extend well beyond a single market.

“In the future I see, you could be browsing a boutique in London or Lagos or Los Angeles, and with SPREEAI’s platform you’d have your own AI stylist right there with you making suggestions, showing you exactly how each piece would look on you, and knowing your preferences so well that it can pull up the perfect accessories too,” Imah said in an interview earlier this year.

It is a vision designed for the way the industry already moves. The product was never built for one geography; it was built for customers who shop across borders without thinking about it.

Building the technology underneath the experience

SPREEAI takes two inputs from a shopper – a photograph and basic measurements – and renders her wearing a specified garment, in multiple poses, in seconds.

“It predicts size with about 99 percent accuracy based on brand tech packs. We focus on two pain points: returns and conversion. Around 60 percent of users who click ‘Try On’ convert to a sale. Beyond that, it helps brands understand fit preferences, looser versus tailored, before production,” John says.

Easy to describe; harder to build. What has stalled most attempts before SPREEAI is the difference between recognising a garment and rendering one. Photoreal output that holds up across different bodies, lighting conditions, fabric types and angles is a much harder problem than identifying what something is. A jacket that looks correct on a digital avatar can read as off the moment it appears on a real person’s frame. The technology has to manage drape, weight, proportion, and the visual cues the eye registers in a split second without consciously cataloguing them.

“In fashion, intelligence without taste is not enough,” Imah has said. “The technology has to work – but it also has to respect how people see themselves.”

This is where SPREEAI’s positioning differs from the broader try-on category. The company was built fashion-first rather than tech-first, an inversion Imah has pressed in industry settings.

“AI in fashion isn’t about robots taking over; it’s about humans and AI coming together to push creativity forward,” he argues.

The thesis has attracted an unusual roster around the company. On the research side, the company collaborates with MIT and Carnegie Mellon. Imah is a member of the Council of Fashion Designers of America and has been recognised on major AI leadership lists for his work in the field.

In 2025, he became one of the few technology founders ever invited to the Met Gala – reportedly the first from AI fashion-tech – wearing custom Sergio Hudson for the Superfine: Tailoring Black Style theme. He was back at the Met Gala in 2026 for Costume Art, in a turn that signalled how comfortably he now moves between the design and technology sides of the industry.

A global language

For markets where customers expect both digital sophistication and personalised service, the implications of what SPREEAI is building are significant. A customer using a participating brand’s site can see a consistent photorealistic try-on experience across markets. The system is designed to scale across regions without losing the sense that it has been calibrated for the individual person clicking the button.

“Style has no borders,” Imah said in a recent interview. “It’s a global language.”

It is a phrase that could sound abstract, except that the company’s architecture backs it up. SPREEAI’s infrastructure is built to accommodate the way modern luxury shopping operates – internationally, often through multiple touchpoints, often within a single customer journey. The try-on experience adapts to the person, not to her geography.

For two decades, online fashion has treated high return rates as the cost of doing business and personalisation as a luxury reserved for a small tier of customers. The architecture SPREEAI is building points toward a different default – one where the experience adjusts to the customer rather than the other way around, and where that calibration travels with her regardless of which city’s site she happens to be shopping on.

That is the bigger bet underneath the try-on button.

ITP Media Group newsroom and editorial staff were not involved in the creation of this content.