Shopify’s former head of its app ecosystem business is launching an AI imaging tool for online sellers
- Fatima Yusuf is launching ImagineCreate AI, an AI imaging tool for Shopify merchants.
- Yusuf previously led Shopify’s ecosystem business.
- Before she joined Shopify, she cofounded the e-commerce startup Tressle.
When Fatima Yusuf decided to leave Shopify in the summer of 2022, she intended to spend more time with her family and consider her next steps. Yusuf led Shopify’s ecosystem business for more than four years, working with third-party developers and partners who build technology for Shopify’s millions of merchants.
But it wasn’t long before Yusuf was ready to start her own company. She eventually founded two companies, one of which is ImagineCreate AI, an AI imaging tool that will officially launch on Tuesday with an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding from Precursor Ventures.
ImagineCreate AI was inspired directly by a brand Yusuf founded shortly after leaving Shopify. She had decided to launch a beauty oil brand for skin and hair during the holiday season.
While developing the beauty oil brand, she discovered a new issue: taking great product photos can be difficult. Founders must ensure that samples are ready from their manufacturers, reserve a studio, book a photographer, schedule time for photo shoots and editing, and customize the photos for the channels on which they will sell.
“What people don’t realize is that your photos are pretty much everything,” Yusuf explained to Insider. “It’s entirely the way buyers are choosing your product online.”
Yusuf stated that there was a delay in getting her beauty oil sample ready, which delayed the launch of her brand. ChatGPT was released at the same time she was starting work on the beauty oil brand, and she was using AI tools to expedite the process.
That sparked the concept for ImagineCreate AI. Using AI, the app can take a product shot, remove the background, and generate a new background to match the user’s preferences. A merchant might specify that they want their product to be displayed on a vanity in a bedroom, or in a kitchen with white cabinets and hardwood floors. The app can also customize image captions and descriptions for each sales channel.
ImagineCreate AI will be available as a web app that can be integrated into the admin of Shopify merchants.
“This whole process takes weeks and months, and I wanted to bring it down to seconds and minutes,” Yusuf said in an interview.
Using her Shopify knowledge
Yusuf has extensive experience in e-commerce. She cofounded Tressle, a home decor e-commerce company, before joining Shopify in 2018.
However, this is her first time developing in the AI space. Despite her lack of a technical background, she used AI tools to assist her in coding some parts of the app before hiring a small team of developers. The app currently employs Stable Diffusion models, but Yusuf stated that the team is working on incorporating additional models that will be released soon. The goal is to provide merchants with options so that they can select the model that best meets their needs.
She stated that it was critical to her that anyone who wanted to use AI had access to it.
“A lot of merchants I speak with say, yeah, I totally want to use AI, but I can’t spend my day in Discord.” “I’m not sure how to get to this stuff,” Yusuf explained. “What I really want to do is simplify the access that they have to the technology.”
Yusuf’s entrepreneurial journey comes full circle with the launch of ImagineCreate AI on the Shopify App Store. Her role at Shopify entailed collaborating with the company’s third-party partners. Shopify’s App Store contains over 10,000 apps that assist merchants with functions such as marketing, discounting, and shipping.
Yusuf had a front-row seat to all of the technology being developed for e-commerce entrepreneurs while working on the ecosystem business.
“I wanted to build something that I thought could make a difference in the lives of a lot of people and get in the hands of a lot of merchants,” she told me. “This is just me also validating that I believe in the opportunity that exists in the ecosystem equally as much outside.”
Yusuf is one of dozens of Shopify alumni who have gone on to pursue full-time entrepreneurship.
Working at Shopify, she explained, necessitates considering how “you scale really important platforms where your customer is a business owner themselves, and has all these different problems, and they’re relying on your service for a key part of their business.”
“A lot of founder-type entrepreneurs are drawn to that company,” she told me.
