Over the course of four decades, J. Crew’s style has woven cashmere cardigans, tweed jackets, and other preppy staples that have attracted high-profile fans including Michelle Obama, Demi Moore, and Meghan Markle.
Throughout the apparel brand’s history—beginning as a catalog, then growing to become a physical and omnichannel retailer—those styling decisions were made by humans. But beginning today, there’s artificial intelligence at work too.
On Wednesday, J. Crew announced a new consumer-facing, AI-enabled tool called Style Advisor, which runs on a collection of Anthropic’s models. Style Advisor is trained on data from thousands of outfit pairings from the company’s photo shoots and J. Crew’s styling principles, outfit and accessories pairings.
“It’s not just about the piece that you’re looking for, but how to style it,” says Danielle Schmelkin, chief information officer at J. Crew. “What those stylists bring to the table—and really recommend more than just the item that you may have picked up when you walked into the store—we are really looking to create that online.”
As more shoppers gravitate to agentic shopping, with more than 50% of global consumers using AI to buy goods within the past three months, new tools have proliferated ranging from Meta Platforms’ Muse agent and Alexa for Shopping from Amazon to AI shopping assistants created by retailers including Lowe’s, Ulta Beauty, and Macy’s.
But while 56% of consumers say they use AI chat or search tools including Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, only 27% are gravitating to retailer-created AI shopping assistants, according to consulting firm McKinsey.
“I think the visual piece is really important,” says Schmelkin of the distinctive edge that she promises Style Advisor will offer. In the future, the tool will also pull in data from a consumer’s past purchase history, allowing Style Advisor to make even more personalized recommendations, replicating that’s already possible during the omnichannel shopping experience.
She says Style Advisor is also grounded in contextual details, asking questions to better understand a shopper’s intent. If a J. Crew customer were to tell it that they were looking for an outfit to attend a wedding—in, say, Miami, but not too formal—the tool will make recommendations based on these nuances.
Style Advisor will debut on J. Crew’s desktop website and is expected to later be added to the retailer’s mobile app.
J. Crew’s Style Advisor runs on a variety of Claude’s models, including Fable 5.1, which is leveraged to handle the more complex and ambiguous judgment that allows the tool to think and respond like a stylist. Claude’s Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 4.5 support the speed and efficiency of the back-and-forth responses between consumers and the AI stylist, while Claude Opus 5.5 was utilized by J. Crew’s team to build a working prototype.
“What is the actual experience that we want the shopper to have, and then, how do we think about making sure that we’re mapping the right models to be able to deliver that,” says Lauren Collett, Anthropic’s enterprise go-to-market leader.
Schmelkin says J. Crew built in a back-end observation layer that allows the retailer to closely monitor the costs. “We want to make sure we are constantly refining and using these models in the right way, both in terms of the outputs for our customers, but also the efficiency we want to see to make this scalable,” says Schmelkin.
Internally at J. Crew, to bolster AI adoption, the retailer has created an AI fluency program that begins with the basics and advances up through vibe coding. An internal AI lab, called “Second Thread,” began with just the tech team but has broadened to incorporate all corporate employees to discuss AI use cases and propose other technology solutions.
For four years, J. Crew has also run a two-day tech summit that features workshops, hackathons, guest speakers, and vendor presentations. Initially, this programming was only available to the tech team, but J. Crew has more recently democratized access. Employees are also encouraged to use AI enterprise tools from Anthropic and OpenAI.
The Style Advisor was conceptualized by a J. Crew digital product designer, who developed a working prototype before engineers were pulled into the project. The fact that the tool wasn’t mandated from the top of J. Crew’s C-suite reflects Schmelkin’s efforts to encourage employees to chart their own path on AI.
“I’ve been screaming to anyone who will listen for years now to get in there and build a habit,” says Schmelkin. “You have to find your a-ha moment and then all of a sudden…this could really change the way you think about your own life, work, and team productivity.”
John Kell
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com