At any given moment, Fanatics offers more than 1.5 million unique SKUs for sports fans to buy — from jerseys and hats to team-branded streetwear and socks. The search for those items is getting easier with a new feature called "Shop the Look," created with the help of OpenAI's Codex.
Fanatics' product assortment reflects its rise into a massive sports-industry platform, with deals with nearly every major sports league and team worldwide. Each year, Fanatics Commerce manufactures more than 45 million items and sells them to customers in more than 180 countries.
But Justin Tsai, chief product officer for Fanatics Commerce, said that growth has also created a challenge for the company.
"One problem we just kept seeing was that our customers come to our sites, and we operate hundreds of these sites … their challenges are that they're always trying to look through our very large catalog to figure out what they can buy," he said.
Tsai said customers' shopping sessions routinely ran over 30 minutes on average, and that time kept compounding as Fanatics released upwards of a thousand new products each week.