How Dubs’ AI footscanner cut returns and trimmed its carbon footprint
Stuart Davis is a PR consultant at Dubs, a sustainable footwear brand making children’s sneakers with circular design. Launched in 2022, Dubs focuses on comfort, durability and reducing waste, and its practical use of an AI footscanner to improve sizing is the detail that makes this story worth reading.
Dubs shows that targeted AI can deliver measurable customer and sustainability gains: their AI footscanner reduced wrong-size returns and lowered the brand’s carbon footprint, while keeping alternative human measurement options for customers who prefer them.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
Dubs is a sustainable footwear brand making sneakers for kids that are as comfortable on feet as it is light on the planet. As a brand we are pioneering circular design and disrupting one of the most polluting categories in fashion: children’s footwear.
Launched in 2022 Dubs exists because they recongised the shoe market for children was broken. Too many brands were simply shrinking down adult styles and calling them kids shoes. Fast fashion was churning out cheap throwaway pairs that wrecked feet and trashed the planet. And buying any of it was a nightmare.
Today Dubs is on a mission to make sure nothing slows children down. Not uncomfortable shoes. Not shoes that fall apart. Not shoes that wreck the planet. Working with parents and children Dubs makes really comfortable trainers that let kids be kids and keep going long after they have outgrown them.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Currently most of Dubs customers find us online but we are hoping to change that in 2027 with the introduction of new colours and styles and being stocked in more retail outlets globally.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
We’ve handed over sizing to AI. Dubs new AI footscanner has been a gamechanger for our customers as it is quick and easy to use and is really accurate. As a result we have noticed a considerable drop in returns due to wrong sizes and also it is further reducing Dubs carbon footprint. For those who aren’t fans of AI we do offer two other ways to measure feet – a printer method and a pen and paper method. Neither are as accurate as the AI footscanner.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
We are beginning to get customers finding us through AI but because Dubs is still relatively new to the market and small it doesn’t always pop up when people search. Hopefully that will change over the next 12 months.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Of course you can’t ignore AI and it is very helpful in terms of growing the business and improving customer experience. But there is a danger of brands becoming too samey and bland, so we need to be aware of that and combine human thinking with AI to stay authentic and keep our individual identities alive.
Thank you to Stuart Davis and the team at Dubs for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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