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About Trendsi
Trendsi is a fashion B2B platform and the #1 fashion dropshipping app on Shopify.
As a fast-growing startup, it offers dropshipping, wholesale, and made-to-order services
with AI-assisted sourcing, fast shipping, and quality assurance—helping merchants
streamline operations and scale their businesses.
About Trendsi AI Souring Tool
What's the Problem?
At Trendsi, one challenge we saw was that many of our users which small and medium-sized e-commerce sellers discovered products they liked on other websites or social media, but struggled to find suppliers or similar items on our platform or database. We wanted to solve this gap and make sourcing much easier.
User Research & Personas
Through interviews with high-volume merchants and analysis of support tickets, I identified key pain points:
Manual copy-paste was slow and error-prone.
Merchants struggled to find reliable suppliers for trending items.
Lack of automation limited their ability to scale.
Personas reflected busy boutique owners running multiple campaigns who needed speed, reliability, and confidence in sourcing.
Competitive Analysis
We reviewed similar tools and platforms with image-based search. Many offered partial solutions but lacked seamless integration with workflows. Trendsi’s extension differentiated by combining image + text multimodal AI, embedding retrieval for accurate matches, and direct submission to sourcing requests within the same flow.
Project Overview
The AI-Sourcing Extension is a Chrome plug-in designed for SMB merchants to streamline the product sourcing process. Instead of manually collecting product details and emailing requests, merchants can now capture product images, enter URLs or text descriptions, and instantly find similar items in the Trendsi catalog. This tool significantly reduces sourcing time and improves accuracy.
My Role
As the Founding Product Designer, I led the project end-to-end: conducting user research, mapping workflows, creating wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes, integrating with the design system, and collaborating with product and engineering teams to balance user needs with technical feasibility.
Solution?
I designed an AI-powered Chrome extension that enables Trendsi’s SMB users to instantly submit sourcing requests and perform image-based product searches directly from any website. With one click, users can capture an image or URL and the extension returns the top three similar products from our supplier database.
Working closely with product, data and engineering team, I created a lightweight browser plug-in that:
Automates sourcing submissions – Users can send requests directly from their browser without switching tabs or forms.
Delivers instant image search – Upload or capture any product image to retrieve three similar items from Trendsi’s catalog.
Accepts text descriptions – Allows users to enter additional text details to better specify their sourcing needs and improve matching accuracy.
Streamlines UI – A clean, minimal interface aligned with Trendsi’s design system guides users through capturing, submitting, and reviewing results in seconds.
Boosts efficiency – Reduces manual steps and improves the speed of supplier discovery, ultimately strengthening our supply-chain competitiveness.
User Flow
Design System Integration
The extension reused Trendsi’s design system while introducing new patterns for AI-driven results display, making it scalable and consistent with the Trendsi platform’s ecosystem.
AI Technology Integration
This extension leverages computer vision and embedding retrieval to power instant, accurate matches. When a user clicks the plug-in, AI analyzes product images on the page and generates vector embeddings, which are then compared to our catalog’s embeddings to surface the closest matches. At the same time, it captures on-page text descriptions and feeds them into a multimodal (image + text) model, improving the precision of search results and enabling richer, more relevant sourcing recommendations.
Final Design & High-Fidelity Screens
Download and install the extension with Trendsi Account
Enter URL + Text Input (Optional) and submit to Trendsi for souring request
Enter URL + Text Input (Optional) and find similar products on Trendsi platform
Upload Image
Impact & Metrics
As the Founding Product Designer, I led the project end-to-end: conducting user research, mapping workflows, creating wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes, integrating with the design system, and collaborating with product and engineering teams to balance user needs with technical feasibility.
Within the first quarter:
Adoption: 500+ installs, with 65% active weekly users.
Efficiency: 3× increase in sourcing requests per user compared to manual email.
Engagement: Image search used in 70% of sessions, with 45% click-through on returned items.
Operational savings: Reduced manual sourcing support tickets by 40%.
Future Iterations
Planned improvements include batch image uploads, advanced filtering by category/price, and personalized recommendations based on merchant behavior. These will further enhance scalability and user satisfaction.
Take Away
The feature made sourcing much easier for our users — they could now instantly turn inspiration into inventory. It also helped us differentiate in a competitive B2B marketplace and increased user engagement on the platform. This project showed me how design and AI together can really drive business impact.
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