Global eyewear company Zenni was facing a problem in 2022: Its customer acquisition costs had risen by around 40% year-over-year, growth had halved from the previous year and the company was spending over $120 million per year on marketing.
That year, David Ting became Zenni’s chief technology officer and global gm for the company and made changes that quickly proved impactful. By cutting back on expensive creative campaigns and using generative AI to create new marketing ideas and product imagery, Ting said he was able to cut Zenni’s marketing costs by half while doubling its profits. Zenni is a privately held company and doesn’t share specific revenue figures — it last reported revenue of around $400 million in 2021.
“We’ve always been a profitable company,” Ting said. “And I have an ROI-based way of thinking about these things. We’ll put more money into the things that are working, and we’ll slow down on the things that aren’t working.”
Ting shared several statistics to back up the claim that his AI-based approach to marketing has transformed the business. Beginning with his tenure at the company, Zenni started using AI-generated models in product imagery to showcase glasses on models with different skin tones and face shapes. Products with AI-generated models had a 30% higher conversion rate, he said. While Zenni is now using AI-generated models and copy in advertising, it also continues to partner with real celebrities like actress Keke Palmer and NFL player George Kittle. Ting said the ads with celebrity faces always perform the best, but AI-generated campaigns are a close second.
In addition, when brainstorming new product packaging slogans, Ting said he recently pitted ideas proffered by Zenni’s marketing team against a number of ideas he sourced from ChatGPT, putting them up to a vote. Two of the top five ideas came from ChatGPT, with one of them ending up on Zenni’s product packaging. More AI-related plans are in the works for Zenni, including an expanded virtual try-on option.
But these changes haven’t come without hiccups. Most notably, Ting said Zenni’s employees haven’t always been happy with his AI-focused approach.
“I was blasted on Glassdoor when I took over, especially because I preach AI as a creative tool,” Ting said. “There was a huge amount of organizational pushback. A lot of skepticism. We ran into challenges where people [on the creative and marketing side] were wanting to sabotage the results of our AI experiments.”
Ting said the opposition within the company has calmed down in recent months, especially as the doubled profits and other positive benchmarks are reported. Zenni has a profit share model among its employees, so the doubled profits positively affect everyone’s paycheck, which went a long way toward getting everyone on board with Ting’s vision, he said.
Ting’s emphasis on AI comes at a fraught time for the technology. While many companies both in and out of the fashion and beauty industries have embraced AI, others have steered clear. Dove, for example, has made a promise never to use AI to generate imagery of models as part of its central brand pillar to emphasize real women and bodies. Meanwhile, cautionary reports from Goldman Sachs and others have indicated the rabid frenzy of investment around AI in the last year may soon start to taper off.
But for now, Ting said he’s confident it’s what works best for Zenni.
“AI will not replace people,” Ting said. “It lets our creative team have big-budget thinking but do it cheap. Imagination is the constraint, not the budget.”
