Hey, fashion tech crew 😊 Felipe here. Today’s story has been living rent free in my head for a while...
The founder
Ondrej Bagin has been playing with faces since 2002. His first hit was a virtual makeup artist that landed deals with Rossmann and L’Oréal. In 2008 he and programmer Peter Soós launched Happy Hair, where anyone could try celebrity hairstyles on their own photo. It hit around 2 million users.
They reinvested that money and, in 2014, started building a plug and play try-on any online store could use. First it was Virtooal. Today it’s Auglio. In 2016 Vít Endler, former head of Mall, came in as investor and co-owner because, in his words, it solves one of e-commerce’s big problems: returns.
The market
Buying glasses or lipstick online has always been a gamble. AR try-on fixes that, and it’s growing fast: eyewear try-on was about $1.15B in 2024, heading to $4.5B by 2030, and makeup try-on about $6.3B, heading to $18.3B (Grand View Research).
The startup
Shoppers turn on the camera and see frames, lenses or makeup on their own face, live.
Under the hood it’s seriously hard tech: real time face tracking, computer vision, auto pupillary distance for 1:1 scale, face shape detection, and even “Invisible Glasses”, which erases the glasses you’re wearing and puts the virtual ones on. Brands only need a 2D photo, and there are 500,000+ products already virtualized.
Setup is a snippet of code, because Ondrej would rather have thousands of customers than twenty big ones. In 2022 they were on 6,000+ stores across five continents, with revenue doubling three years straight. Clients include Avon, L’Oréal, YSL and Japanese eyewear chain Zoff, which saw 4x more conversions.
My take
When I dove into fashion tech, Auglio was one of my biggest inspirations. They’re not from the Valley, London or Berlin. They’re from Komárno, a small town on the Danube. And they picked one of the hardest products to get right: biometrics, computer vision, a virtual frame sitting on a real nose on any webcam, in any light. They pulled it off with real mastery.
Where you start doesn’t decide how far you go.
Get to know them
Website: auglio.com · LinkedIn · YouTube
Building something cool in fashion tech? Drop your pitch in the comments.
