Be honest about how you actually shop. You see a coat on someone’s story. You screenshot it. You reverse-image-search it at 1am, find it on three sites at three prices, drop it into the group chat with “thoughts??”, get two thumbs-up and one “the colour washes you out,” add it to a basket, leave it there for eleven days, and eventually buy something else entirely. Nobody designed shopping to work like this. It just… happened, app by app, tab by tab.
A new platform called WNTD – pronounced “Wanted” – has looked at that beautiful mess and decided the answer is to put the whole thing in one place. Launching this spring, it bills itself not as a retailer but as an intelligent layer that sits across the entire shopping ecosystem, bridging the gap between inspiration and purchase. You can save a look from anywhere – social media, a website, in-store, real life – then virtually try it on, restyle it, compare it and crowdsource feedback before you spend a penny.
The thesis is generational. The platform claims that over 70% of Gen Z discover fashion on social platforms rather than retail sites, while the tools they use to actually decide what to buy remain scattered across apps that don’t talk to each other. WNTD’s pitch is to collapse that fragmentation. Its tagline – “See Yourself Differently” – does a lot of quiet work, gesturing at both the literal try-on tech and a softer promise about confidence and self-image.
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Under the hood, WNTD bundles a suite of features that read like a wishlist scraped from a decade of shopping frustrations: virtual try-on (“see yourself in anything, instantly”), AI styling that generates outfits and aesthetics on demand, a save-from-anywhere capture tool, social validation that lets you poll friends or the community, smart pricing that tells you when to buy rather than just what, voice shopping for hands-free browsing, and a “Studio” mode for experimenting with everything from outfits to hair to a full aesthetic overhaul. There’s also a Safari extension that lets you shop without leaving the page – saving items with a single tap, flagging whether a deal is actually good, suggesting alternatives and enabling try-ons inline. The company calls it “the ultimate personal shopping assistant.”
What stops this from being just another try-on gimmick is the founders’ insistence that shopping is now fundamentally social and non-linear. “Shopping today isn’t linear anymore,” says founder Lex Deak. “People discover inspiration everywhere, on social media, in magazines, on the street, and they ask friends before they buy. WNTD brings all of that behaviour together in one place so people can explore their style and make better decisions.”
Deak is not a first-timer. He exited his first company, Sell It Shack, at 23, co-founded an investment platform that has helped more than 200 businesses raise over £250 million, and built the consumer app Basket, which grew to more than 300,000 UK users helping people organise what they wanted to buy and track prices. WNTD, in his telling, builds on that foundation but moves past mere organisation into decision-making – the genuinely hard part, where most of us stall.
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The other half of the founding story is worth pausing on, because it quietly answers a question the fashion-tech world rarely does well: where are the women building this stuff? WNTD was built alongside Lee Lythe, who joined as CMO after working with Deak on Basket. With more than two decades in strategic marketing and media investment, Lythe led campaigns for major global brands and was the first female Chief Investment Officer at Spark Foundry UK before moving into startups. Having someone who has spent a career thinking about how women actually respond to brands shaping a product aimed largely at women is not a footnote – it’s a competitive advantage.
“Technology is changing how people discover fashion,” says Lythe. “WNTD gives people a way to experiment with their style, see how something looks on them and get feedback before they decide to buy.”
The healthy scepticism is worth keeping in your back pocket. AI styling tools have a long history of confidently recommending the same beige capsule wardrobe to everyone; virtual try-on has historically ranged from “uncanny” to “actively unflattering”; and a platform that learns “what you like and how you make decisions” is, by definition, hoovering up a detailed map of your taste, your insecurities and your spending triggers. “Social validation” can shade into social pressure quickly, and an app that makes everything you see instantly buyable is not, on paper, an obvious friend to your bank balance or your overflowing wardrobe.
But the underlying read on behaviour is hard to argue with. We already shop this way – chaotically, collaboratively, across a dozen tabs, asking everyone we know before we commit. WNTD’s bet is simply that someone should build the tool that matches the behaviour, rather than forcing the behaviour to bend around the tools. “Not just what to wear,” the company says, “but who to be.” That’s a big claim for a shopping app. Whether it earns it will come down to the least glamorous question in tech: does the try-on actually look like you? Spring will tell.
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