“AI-tool Sizebay wants to boost online fashion sales”

What the piece reports

Published the same week as the ChannelX piece, to a different European audience, and read as a company arriving rather than a company visiting. The outlet calls it a scale-up providing AI for fashion e-commerce, founded in Brazil, with its European headquarters opened in Portugal that year and now operating as a Portuguese company as well, with new retail contracts in Portugal and France. The brands are named in the piece and not here.

The product description is the same as everywhere else, and the honest thing about this piece is that everything else in it is a forecast. Marcelo Bastos tells the outlet what the company expects rather than what it has done: returns and exchanges cut by half, sales up 5%. The revenue lines are forecasts too, a 75% increase for 2019 over the previous year and 150% projected for 2020, helped by billing in stronger currencies.

Which is worth stating plainly, because it is the kind of number a marketing page usually launders into a result. It was a projection made in December 2019 by a company that had just opened in Europe. What actually happened to that operation is in the later pieces in this record, reported by outlets that came back years afterwards.