Is anyone else surprised that stitchfix has been successful for long enough that they can keep such a skilled and productive data science team around? Especially considering how much churn subscription box companies have, I'm shocked that they're apparently doing so well.
They need a skilled data science team. That's the only way for them to have been so successful. When you're a small company, using your data science team to optimize every interaction is key. It's not just the image analysis, but also logistics, inventory, shipping, etc.
I look at posts like this as a very small view into one of the problems they've worked on. This post really offered little by way of rationale for why they are extracting colors. The earlier post offers a bit more, but not much.
Instead, I think that a post like this describes how they approach a challenge and how they automate work that would require manual annotation. I actually think of this analysis more as decision support (making manual review easier) as opposed to full-on automation.
