Nathan Harding, CEO of Luum, joins Cheddar Innovates to discuss the process of having a robot put on eyelash extensions, and how automation is making its way into the beauty industry

Cheddar Innovates

See How This A.I.-Based Robot Can Put on Your Eyelash Extensions

Welcome back to cheddar innovates brought to you by curiosity stream. If you've ever gotten your eyelashes done, you know this is a time consuming and up close and personal process with a beauty industry professional, But would you consider having a robot do this instead? Well, joining us now Nathan harding Ceo of loom. A company created an ai based lash robot. Nathan, thanks so much for joining us. Walk us through how exactly the loom process works. Thanks for having me as I'm a big fan actually. Um so in the loom process, you, you go into your appointment, you lay down on the salon chair, they put in masks that are very similar to the, to the eye masks that you wear now in the manual process and then your slid under a machine and in this machine there's two little robots, one little robot picks through your lashes looking for an isolated lash and another robot picks up an extension, dips it in glue and then places it on that on that target lash. And the great thing about it is the only thing that can reach you through this little window are these little ultra delicate wands that are held on by little magnets. So if you were to just bump them with your finger, they just fall right off. And so that's really the key to the safety system because you know, you could, you could sneeze or do whatever you want. If you thrust your head right into the tools the robots used, they just fall off. So interesting, taking a look at some of that video. Someone who has also lost a lot of eyelashes to eyelash extensions. So what are some of the benefits of this compared to traditional eyelash extensions? So the first thing, of course, is the speed we're out to really change the experience. I mean, if you book a full full lash appointment now with one of the major franchises, they'll book you for a 90 minute or two hour session And we want to change that to a 30 minute session. I mean, we basically want to take this from this big arduous thing that you have to plan your day around and to make it into and I'll be right back, That sounds amazing. Um, but I think a lot of people out there, especially during this time wondering could this potentially take jobs away from eyelash tax? So how could it benefit those as well? Yes. So this is not a human replacement play at all. This is a human augmentation play, which are the kind of robotics place like, um, it's, it's gonna take existing lash artists and it's going to triple their output. And so they're gonna be incredibly profitable people for our partners and they're gonna be able to have great jobs with these big organizations that it, I can't afford to give them great benefits which they can't get. Now. I think it's going to be, I think it's going to be a win win for everybody. Really interesting And Nathan, you have a crowdfunding campaign live right now. What's the goal with the crowdfunding campaign? That's right. So anybody with $250 can go on our website right now and click the invest button and invest in loom. And what we're doing with the money is we're putting it towards making our production machines so that we can do our rollout soon with our Partner, we partnered with a top five us cosmetics brand. I do have a question in terms of just like the actual experience of getting your lashes done. Sometimes the placement can be everything. Have you gotten any feedback on how the robot actually matches up when it comes to attack? Because you know, when you're dealing with a person in real time, you can kind of give them your feedback. They might be able to adjust it. Um, what are some of the differences there? Yeah, Well that's another thing. I mean we, we work with slash artist slash artists are going to run our machine actually in our financial model, we put more time for human interaction with your lash artists than they can afford to do now. And so what we're gonna, we want those, um, we want those people to be able to fix anything the robot might do that doesn't look perfect and maybe augmented a little bit too if they'd like to do it after the robot's done. The robot just has to do the bulk of the lashes super fast and of course it's super accurate. I mean this is plus or minus 10 micron accuracy you're talking about. So it's really on a different level. They should they should all look great and if they don't, our lash artist is going to fix it And Nathan just about 30 seconds left with you. How else do you see tech really making an emergence on the beauty space? Yes. So we want to create a totally new category called beauty experience automation. We think that the US salon industry has been ignored by technologists so far and you know it's it's actually bigger than the U. S. Video game industry. So I think that it's high time that we look at how to use automation to improve margins and improve the experience of making more glamorous to clients. Alright, Nathan harding ceo at loom so interesting. Thanks so much for joining us.