Artificial intelligence is reshaping the fashion industry from the inside out — and John Imah, CEO and co-founder of SPREEAI, is one of the key architects of that transformation. Long before AI in fashion became a mainstream conversation, Imah was building toward a single, defining idea: that the way people shop for clothing is fundamentally broken, and that the right technology can fix it.
There is a particular kind of frustration that anyone who has shopped online knows well. You find the garment, you read the measurements, you scroll through the model shots, and you still have absolutely no idea whether it will work — on you, on your body, with the rest of what you own. You order it anyway. It arrives. You hold it up, and something is wrong: the drape, the color against your skin, the way it falls at a length you'd misjudged. You pack it back into the box and return it. In modern fashion, disappointment has become part of the transaction.
John Imah, the Nigerian-American co-founder and CEO of SPREEAI, would like to make shopping experience obsolete. "For the consumer, the benefit is clarity and confidence," he says. "You're no longer guessing how something will look, how it fits into your wardrobe, or whether it aligns with your personal style. The experience becomes more intuitive, more personalized, and ultimately more enjoyable."
SPREEAI was born in 2023 from a trip Imah made to Europe to meet fashion executives. "They all started saying the same thing," he recalls. "'We need a product that will increase our sales, lower returns, and add personalization.' That was the genesis of SPREEAI." The company has since achieved a $1.5 billion valuation, secured partnerships with MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and the CFDA, as well as sent Imah to the Met Gala as the first fashion-tech AI startup CEO ever invited.
The Mirror Goes Digital
Imah came to artificial intelligence well before it entered the mainstream. "What interested me early on," he says, "was its ability to reshape behavior at scale without being intrusive." That conviction runs through SPREEAI's platform: a customer uploads a photo, selects a garment, and sees themselves wearing it — rendered with photorealistic fidelity, from multiple angles, with 99% sizing accuracy. The global virtual try-on market sat at $12.5 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $48–50 billion by 2030. SPREEAI's pipeline — an AI stylist, a virtual wardrobe, hyper-personalized recommendations — positions it to be central to that expansion.
"Going forward, I think AI becomes less about spectacle, more about precision. The next phase is systems that understand context deeply — your preferences, your habits, your intent — and respond in a way that feels natural."
For high fashion, Imah's vision carries specific weight. "Over the next five years, we'll see digital environments that understand your wardrobe, your body, your preferences, and even your intent for a specific moment. Not just what you like, but why you like it." The fear that algorithmic culture will flatten taste into a global average is one he takes seriously — and rejects with equal force. "In fashion, that's where it gets fascinating. Because fashion is emotional, not just functional. The technology has to respect that. It has to enhance taste, not override it." And so, he adds, "The role of AI isn't to replace personal taste. It's to refine and to guide it. When it works properly, it doesn't feel like technology at all. It just feels like a better way to shop."
Crucially, Imah refuses the assumption that any of these lives exclusively online. "I don't think of online and offline as separate anymore. The strongest brands have already collapsed that distinction. It's one continuous experience. Digital should give you access, intelligence, and personalization. Physical should give you emotion, presence, and texture. When those two are aligned, the brand feels complete. That's how we've approached SPREEAI — not just as something that lives on a website, but something that can support the entire customer journey, including in-store." It is a position that distinguishes SPREEAI from competitors focused solely on e-commerce — and one that reflects how seriously Imah takes the physical, sensory dimension of fashion.
Imah has been deliberate about positioning SPREEAI as something native to fashion. "This is not a tech company observing fashion from a distance," he says. "It's something embedded in it. We care about the details, the craftsmanship, the surrounding culture."
On Sustainability, Scale, and What Comes Next
The case for AI in fashion extends well beyond personalization. Those staggering return rates generate carbon emissions, packaging waste, and feed the overproduction cycles that have long troubled the industry. When a shopper can see, with genuine accuracy, how a garment will fit their specific body, the impulse to over-order diminishes — meaning lower return rates, higher conversion, and reduced operational costs for retailers, and a lighter footprint for the planet.
Imah is unambiguous about scale. "We reimagine the shopping landscape. Whether it's in-store or online, we step back and ask how AI can transform real-world challenges into seamless, exciting experiences." He has compared SPREEAI's singular focus to OpenAI's — "We're no different from OpenAI. We're just focused specifically on shopping." For the next generation of founders, his message is equally direct: "In fashion-tech, your visual identity is not separate from your product — it's an extension of it. The founders who stand out will be the ones who understand both sides. They can build real technology, but they also have taste."
Catching Feelings
There is a broader lesson here, too. The most serious founders in fashion AI will not be the ones who treat technology as a magic trick. They will be the ones who understand that fashion is built on feeling as much as function. Imah makes that point directly when he speaks about visual identity, imagery, tone, and emotion as essential to the next generation of fashion-tech businesses. In this space, product and perception are not separate. "People need to feel what you're building before they fully understand it," he says. "That comes through how you present, how you design, how you communicate."
That may be why his vision of AI feels more durable than most. It is not based on the fantasy that technology can replace fashion's human core. It is based on the belief that technology can become sophisticated enough to serve it. SPREEAI's promise, at least as he frames it, is not just better software. It is a more intelligent retail experience — one that reduces doubt, honors the deeply personal nature of how people dress, and makes both online and in-store shopping feel more coherent.
"If you get that right, you're not just building a company. You're building a world people want to be part of."
In a cultural moment obsessed with whether AI will take over, John Imah is asking a subtler question: what if the real breakthrough is not that AI does more, but that it understands more? In fashion, that may be the difference between technology that feels imposed and technology that finally feels native to the way people actually shop, dress, and decide. This, in the end, is what makes his work worth watching.