TheNextCloset (TNC) is an online marketplace for second-hand, female, designer fashion mainly sourced from the Benelux countries.

Shoppers love it due to the curated items and care and attention paid to authenticity and quality.

With sustainability at its heart, TNC’s mission is to make second-hand designer fashion the consumer’s first choice.

TNC wanted an automation solution to perfectly remove the background from its photos of its best clothing items.Up to that point, the production team had been removing backgrounds by hand. They found remove.bg on Google and compared our software with a number of competitors’. remove.bg beat competitors on both quality and scale.

TNC was happy with remove.bg but the images weren’t perfect.

That is because of the content of the user-generated pictures. TNC does provide guidelines to sellers and also stipulates the format and size. But the company is ultimately not in control of what is uploaded.

Frequent challenges with background removal are that users include various elements in the pictures, such as hangers, mannequins, or even decoration. As a result, some parts were not removed along with backgrounds in processed images.

Despite guidelines, people also send pictures taken in low light or with distractions.

To help improve results, TheNextCloset and remove.bg used data to improve the training of the AI. This led to a better success rate with their pictures (fewer background remnants) and better conversion rates in their shop.

TheNextCloset uses remove.bg on about 85% of items for sale. As a result of the collaborative work and AI training, background removal overall is way faster and easier. Using remove.bg significantly reduced the amount of time spent processing images and resulted in cost-savings - chiefly on personnel hours.

At the moment, remove.bg delivers perfect results on 89% of the processed images. Through more AI training, we aim for further improvements and deliver 95% perfection results for TheNextCloset!