She bought a pair of green waxed leggings, couldn't figure out what to wear with them, and decided a machine should have the answer. That hunch became FindMine.
Co-Founder & CEO, FindMine · New York
Open a product page at Lululemon, Gap, Adidas or Anine Bing and you may meet Michelle Bacharach's work before you ever meet her name. FindMine, the company she co-founded and runs as CEO, is the quiet layer of artificial intelligence that looks at a single product - a jacket, a sneaker, a sofa - and assembles the complete, on-brand outfit or room around it. Not a generic guess. The look a brand's own stylist would have built, produced at a scale no human styling team could match.
That is the deceptively simple promise of FindMine's "Complete the Look" platform: take the taste and merchandising rules that live in the heads of a brand's best people, teach a model to apply them, and run that judgment across millions of products without diluting the brand. Bacharach describes the training process as raising a stylist and a merchandiser at once - feeding the system a brand's expertise so it produces inspirational, inventory-aware assets around every item in the catalog.
She is deliberate about what the technology is for. FindMine sells amplification, not replacement: a way to make a small creative team's taste reach every corner of a sprawling catalog. Brands using it, she has said, see shoppers spend dramatically more and stay engaged longer. The number she returns to in interviews - 200 percent more spend - is the kind of figure that turns a styling widget into a line item executives defend.
Feed a brand's styling and merchandising taste into a model. Let it build a complete, inventory-aware look around every product. Keep it on-brand. Run it at a scale no human team can.
Lululemon. Gap. Adidas. Anine Bing. John Varvatos. American Eagle. The brands change; the job stays the same - turn one product into a reason to buy three.
"Your customers don't know as much about your product, brand, or category as you think they do."Michelle Bacharach
The founding story is refreshingly unglamorous. Preparing to move to New York for business school, Bacharach was assembling a cold-weather, professional wardrobe on a budget. She bought a pair of green waxed cotton leggings and then spent real time online hunting for ways to wear them. The friction of that search - smart product, no idea how to style it - became the thesis. Shoppers, she figured, needed outfit inspiration delivered to them, not a scavenger hunt.
The technical half of the answer arrived through her network at NYU Stern. She met her co-founder and CTO through a classmate; he happened to be the classmate's husband, and when she described the problem, he framed it the way an engineer would - as a machine learning problem worth automating. The service went live in August 2015, modestly, powering a single San Diego boutique on Shopify.
What followed was less a launch and more an act of endurance. Bacharach left her job expecting roughly six months without income. The reality stretched to two and a half years before she drew a first salary, and she stopped taking pay again during the pandemic. Her husband, she has said, served as a kind of pragmatic board of one, running milestone check-ins every six months to decide whether the bet still made sense.
It is a detail that says more than any mission statement. Plenty of founders talk about conviction. Fewer agree to be re-evaluated every six months and keep choosing to continue.
She described the frustration. He heard a machine learning problem. The marriage of a styling instinct and an engineering reflex is, more or less, what FindMine is.
"Doing nothing is sometimes better than doing the wrong thing."On protecting brand credibility over shipping weak tech
Bacharach is unusually candid about culture as strategy. She talks about wanting "real empathy for our customer" and has been blunt that she isn't interested in staffing FindMine with "tech bros." The result reads in the numbers: a team that is roughly three-quarters female, with a majority-female engineering group - rare in enterprise AI, and not by accident.
Her operating philosophy leans toward restraint. She argues that price isn't the only thing customers care about if you give them better value, and that the fastest way to lose a shopper's trust is to surround a good product with bad recommendations. Better to do nothing, she says, than to ship the wrong thing. For a company selling automated suggestions, choosing humility over volume is its own kind of positioning.
She is also honest about how she actually works. Bacharach is not a morning person; she protects her peak hours late in the evening, roughly between 8:30 and 10pm, and builds the day around them. The advice she gives younger women in tech is similarly direct: ask for what you want, gather your research, and speak up about the raise or the promotion rather than waiting to be noticed.
Beyond FindMine she advises George Mason University's Center for Retail Transformation and the Intel Data Center Advisory Board, speaks at SXSW and the NRF Big Show, and mentors founders - often using the presentation instincts she sharpened during that year on stage. Her mother is a therapist, a fact she ties to a longstanding interest in mental health.
"Ask for what you want. If you think you deserve a raise and/or a promotion, gather your research, then speak up."
"Price isn't the only thing important to customers if you give them better value."
"Your customers don't know as much about your product, brand, or category as you think they do."
"Doing nothing is sometimes better than doing the wrong thing."
"Know what standard terms are for the round you're raising; if the term sheet comes before diligence, beware."