Nicole Georgiou is building i spy for the way people really shop

‘The way we shop online has completely changed, but the infrastructure hasn't caught up’Just two months after launching i spy, Cypriot founder and CEO Nicole Georgiou is already seeing signs that the way people discover fashion online may be changing faster than the tools they use to shop it. The London-based fashion-tech platform is built around a familiar problem. An outfit catches your eye on TikTok, Instagram or Pinterest, but finding the pieces behind it can mean screenshots, Google searches, several retailer tabs and saved posts scattered across different platforms. Georgiou is trying to bring those steps together, allowing users to take inspiration from elsewhere, search for exact or similar items, save products into boards and return to them when they are ready to buy. Early users show real purchase intent For Georgiou, the clearest early sign that there is a genuine problem to solve has come from user behaviour, with early users showing that “people aren’t just coming to i spy for inspiration, they’re coming with real purchase intent”. That interest has translated into activity. In the platform’s first two months, entirely through organic growth, “we’ve seen more than 20,000 searches and 800 user-created boards, alongside thousands of products being saved,” she said. Those searches are also increasingly tied to genuine buying decisions, with users looking for “things they genuinely want to wear and potentially buy, wedding guest dresses, holiday outfits, bridal looks and pieces they’ve seen elsewhere”. For Georgiou, however, repeat use matters more than the initial download. “What matters to me isn’t just that someone downloads i spy, but that they come back,” she said, adding that “A download tells you someone was curious. Coming back tells you you’ve created something they actually want to use.” The same applies to how users save products. Georgiou said “a save means something different on i spy”, explaining that on a traditional inspiration platform it can simply mean “I like this”, while on i spy it can mean “I might actually buy this”. That difference is reflected in the way users behave, she added, with people beginning to “search, compare, save and organise products they are genuinely considering”. Fixing a fragmented shopping journey Asked what problem i spy is actually solving for consumers, Georgiou pointed to the increasingly fragmented nature of online shopping, saying “The way we shop online has completely changed, but the infrastructure hasn’t caught up.” A typical journey, she said, might involve seeing an outfit on TikTok, saving something on Instagram, finding inspiration on Pinterest, using Google to search for the product, opening multiple retailer tabs and taking screenshots on a phone. The result is that “The inspiration, search, saving and purchasing parts of the journey are completely disconnected,” she said. That is the gap i spy is trying to close. Georgiou put it simply when she said “i spy connects that journey”, allowing users to “take inspiration from anywhere, find the exact or similar products, save them, organise them and come back when you’re ready to buy”. Building between inspiration and purchase While visual search itself is not new, Georgiou sees i spy as occupying a different place from larger platforms. She described Google Lens as “a strong image search tool” and Pinterest as “incredible for inspiration”, but said i spy is “specifically built around fashion and around what happens between seeing something you like and deciding to buy it”. That space between discovery and purchase is central to the company’s proposition, with Georgiou describing it as “the consideration layer between inspiration and purchase”. Taking on the bigger platforms Asked what makes i spy defensible when Google, Pinterest and other large platforms could potentially build parts of it, Georgiou said there is “a structural reason why this space is still relatively unowned”. In her view, large platforms face conflicting incentives. “Pinterest ultimately wants to keep you on Pinterest, while Google operates within its own ecosystem,” she said, while i spy is “deliberately cross-platform and consumer-first, if you discover something anywhere, you can bring it into i spy”. Georgiou acknowledged that large platforms could technically build elements of the same experience, but said “creating a system that connects users across different platforms and retailers doesn’t naturally align with their existing business models”. Focus is another part of the argument. “We’re also incredibly focused,” she said, contrasting i spy with platforms “building for hundreds of millions of people across many behaviours”. By comparison, she said, “we’re building one thing for one specific behaviour: what happens between seeing something you want and deciding to buy it”. That focus also feeds into the technology itself. Georgiou said “Our proprietary fashion technology and the behaviour we’re learning from searches, saves and interactions become increasingly valuable as the platform grows.” Using AI to understand taste When asked what AI can understand about a shopper that traditional search cannot, Georgiou said its value lies in reducing rather than expanding choice. “I think AI is most useful when it reduces choice rather than simply giving you more of it,” she said. The company is using technology to learn “someone’s real, underlying taste”, looking not just at what a person has searched for once, but at “the patterns across what they repeatedly search for, save, put into boards and eventually keep in their closet”. Over time, Georgiou said, that allows i spy to understand “the person behind the search” and give users “better results, recommendations and discovery”. She is also keen to distinguish that approach from the growing number of AI shopping agents. “We’re not trying to build another AI shopping agent that simply gives you a list of products,” she said, adding that “I want technology to understand someone’s taste while keeping the human and social side of fashion intact.” Changing where shopping begins Georgiou’s ambitions stretch beyond building another fashion app. Asked what she means when she describes i spy as becoming “the default system for online shopping”, she linked that ambition to a change in where the shopping journey actually begins. “When i spy becomes the default system for online shopping, it will be because we’ve changed where people think shopping starts,” she said. That behaviour is already shifting, in her view, because “Shopping used to start with a search bar. Increasingly, it starts with a TikTok, an Instagram post, a creator, a Pinterest board or something you see in real life.” For Georgiou, that is the space i spy wants to occupy, with the aim to “own the moment between seeing something you want and deciding to buy it”. Fashion is where the company is starting because “it’s one of the most visual and fragmented categories”, although she believes “the underlying behaviour is much broader”. Georgiou is also building the company from London as a Cypriot founder, saying the city has given her “access to fashion, technology talent, investors and brands”, while she still sees “a huge opportunity for Cyprus to support globally ambitious consumer technology companies”. The company is now moving into fundraising after what she described as “strong interest from early investors”, with plans “to scale the technology, team and user growth”. Ultimately, however, Georgiou’s measure of success is much simpler. She wants someone to see something they love and instinctively think “I’ll i spy that.”