Can a Nepo Baby and Climate Activist Fix Fast Fashion?
WRITTEN BY LIZ FARIAS
COVER PHOTO: PHIA
Ever since AI tools entered the public sphere, fashion has become a major target for tech startups, aiming to reshape how we consume. Enter Phia, a shopping assistant in the form of a Chrome browser extension and iOS app, promising to make fashion more sustainable, affordable, and streamlined. But does it live up to the hype?
The Founders of Phia
Phia was co-founded by Phoebe Gates, daughter of Bill and Melinda Gates and a vocal women’s health advocate, and Sophia Kianni, a climate activist best known for founding Climate Cardinals and her work with the United Nations. The Phia co-founders were Stanford roommates who bonded over a shared annoyance: constantly juggling shopping tabs when researching what to buy. Their solution? A centralized tool that compares prices, surfaces second-hand options, and recommends similar items using AI.
The pair’s backgrounds make their entry into this space especially interesting. Gates has access to industry titans and role models who understand both philanthropy and startup culture. Kianni, meanwhile, has been navigating high-pressure environments publicly since she was a teenager. In interviews, she’s shared how she faked having an assistant to book better-paying gigs and taught herself how to identify small journalists and podcasts looking for guests—a strategy that helped her generate the press she needed to qualify for a college scholarship at the time. Both women are savvy, media-literate, and fluent in Gen Z speak, which makes sense since their product is built with this demographic in mind.
Phia officially launched in April 2025 and quickly gained traction, in part due to its high-profile founders and early support from investors like Soma Capital, Sara Blakely, Desirée Gruber, Joanne Bradford, and Kris Jenner. On their podcast, The Burnouts with Phoebe & Sophia, the co-founders chat with some of their investors and top business minds, centering women’s experiences in the world of entrepreneurship.
PHOTO CREDIT: @THEBURNOUTSPODCAST ON YOUTUBE
How Phia Works
Phia’s AI recommendation system is built on patented technology (U.S. Patent No. 12,248,974 B1) developed by Phoebe Gates, Sophia Kianni, and Silas Alberti. It combines natural language processing with advanced computer vision to analyze both text and images of resale products. The system continuously crawls thousands of resale websites, extracting product data by using practical rules to pull key details like price, size, and brand from standard parts of each webpage. When a site changes its layout, advanced AI steps in to re-learn how to locate the right information, ensuring the database stays accurate and up to date. Large language models convert messy web content into organized data, while foundation models isolate the exact item in an image, cropping out backgrounds or other products. This blend of techniques allows Phia to create ranked lists of resale items tailored to user preferences, considering factors such as color, brand, and size. Phia reportedly tapped engineers from Pinterest, Meta, and Amazon to build its backend, an infrastructure level uncommon among early-stage startups. These engineers also implemented machine learning feedback loops, enabling smarter recommendations over time.
Phia is free to use, and it earns commissions via affiliate links. When you click through and buy via the platform it recommends, Phia gets a cut. Sophia Kianni has described this approach as long overdue in the secondhand fashion space, noting that the pricing transparency it brings mirrors what already exists in industries like flights and hotels. According to McKinsey’s State of the Consumer 2024, Gen Z shoppers care about sustainability, but many are unwilling to pay more for it, prioritizing affordability and turning to social commerce as a primary shopping channel. Phia doesn’t aim to radically reinvent shopping habits. It combines price-driven utility with sustainability as a bonus, cutting down on research time without compromising what their conscious consumer base cares about.
When asked how Phia differs from competitors like Dupe.com, Phoebe Gates pointed to the platform’s ability to evaluate whether a full-price item is worth the investment, factoring in cost-per-wear. She also emphasized the importance of studying competitors, noting that sharing a space with other innovators offers a chance to learn. Rather than chasing novelty for its own sake, the co-founders seem comfortable with the idea that success doesn’t require reinventing the wheel. Sometimes, it’s about paying attention, absorbing feedback, and improving accordingly. Their sharp sense for branding doesn’t hurt either. With investors from women-led startups, like the former CEO of Honey, Phia is backed by people who understand how to strategize and build cultural relevance. The team knows that winning in this space isn’t always about being first. It’s about being memorable.
Testing Phia for the first time in my Chrome browser, I didn’t love the experience right away. The extension was a bit buggy, which could have been an issue on my end, but it still made the integration feel not-so-seamless. Each time I tried to open my recommendations, they vanished, and I had to refresh the page several times to bring them back. Still, I really appreciated the personalized landing page for my account. It allowed me to view brands and products from my recent searches, bookmark items I liked, and create collections. For anyone who enjoys making moodboards or thoughtfully planning purchases, this part of the user experience feels promising. Phia also suggests similar items when a product is sold out. Depending on your mindset, this can be either a helpful alternative or feel slightly off.
For instance, when I looked up a pair of Niccolò Pasqualetti flats, Phia recommended red leather flats from Poshmark. They were different from what I had in mind, but I found them really cute and would consider buying them. I did notice another small glitch where, after saving some shoes, they started appearing next to images of rings. It made the layout feel a bit confusing, but overall, I can see the potential once these issues are resolved.
The Tradeoff of Convenience
Beyond Phia’s functionality, I do have serious concerns about its privacy policy. One line that caught my eye says they “monitor your purchases… for internal analytics and affiliate commission collection.” In other words, your shopping behavior is feeding a bigger data machine that helps train the AI and fund the product. That’s not unusual (this kind of surveillance capitalism has become normalized), but it does mean we’re giving up more of our digital privacy than many of us realize.
Phia collects browsing data, shopping history, and purchase information, adding yet another layer to the data-surveillance treadmill where convenience comes at the cost of constant tracking and monetization. Since the platform is still new, its user experience didn’t feel polished enough to justify that privacy trade-off. I kept asking myself: do I really need AI telling me what shoes to buy, especially when it deepens my digital footprint?
I’m skeptical about the affiliate link model when it’s been abused by major players before. Companies like PayPal Honey, Capital One, and now Microsoft have faced lawsuits for hijacking affiliate commissions. Microsoft, for example, is currently being sued because its shopping browser extension secretly replaced content creators’ affiliate codes with its own, diverting millions of dollars in commissions that rightfully belong to those creators. This pattern shows how easily these systems can be exploited, often at the expense of creators and consumers alike.
Gates and Kianni are clearly entering the tech space with vision, ambition, and perhaps a genuine desire to build something useful. My critique isn’t directed at them personally, but at the broader space they’re working within. Even well-intentioned tech can normalize surveillance and erode privacy. As someone fatigued by both my online and offline actions being tracked and manipulated to make me want more, I have to ask: what are we really gaining, and what are we giving up?
In the next few years, as AI evolves and legislation tries to catch up, we must remain vigilant. We need to keep asking how companies make their money and whether we’re okay supporting the systems behind the products we use. Convenience and innovation in second-hand fashion are exciting, but they shouldn’t come at the expense of our privacy.
