For fashion brands, showing up in AI search is quickly becoming table stakes. The harder question is what shoppers find when they get there.At Aviator Nation, AI-attributed sales are still in the early stages. Over the last 30 days, the California lifestyle brand saw around 20 orders come through ChatGPT, according to Curtis Ulrich, the company’s director of e-commerce. Compared to the company’s total order volume, that figure is “fairly insignificant,” he said. Still, the brand is already preparing for a future in which AI becomes a more meaningful shopping interface.
“We still want to be mindful of it, and we want to prepare for a future where that’s a dominant form of shopping for us as a clothing brand,” Ulrich said.
As most brands have over the last few months, Aviator Nation has been enriching its product catalog with more detailed metafields, product information and imagery. But Ulrich said the bigger challenge is making sure AI tools understand the brand in the first place.
When Aviator Nation looked at how it was showing up in large language models, the results were not entirely aligned with how the company sees itself. Much of the public information AI tools were picking up centered on its partnerships, including its Major League Baseball and music festival collaborations. Those are important to the brand, but Ulrich said they represent only one part of its identity.
