Fanatics Launches OpenAI-Powered Shop the Look Across League Online Stores

The Oct. 26 commerce launch puts generative AI on product pages across Fanatics' league e-commerce network, pitching coordinated, in-stock team outfits instead of one-off SKU browsing.

Fanatics and OpenAI on Monday launched an OpenAI-powered version of Shop the Look, an online merchandising feature that recommends coordinated, in-stock team merchandise to help fans finish a game-day outfit.

The companies published matching case-study language Oct. 26 on OpenAI's customer site and on Fanatics Inc.'s press page. Shop the Look is live across many Fanatics network sites, including Fanatics.com and the official NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL online stores. When a fan views a team jersey or other item, the feature suggests matching pieces on the product page using in-stock inventory tied to that team and intended style. OpenAI models assemble the looks from enriched product, team and inventory data; Fanatics merchandising rules keep selections compatible; and looks refresh daily as catalogs change.

Fanatics also said it already uses ChatGPT Work and Codex across Fanatics Corporate, Commerce, Collectibles, and Betting and Gaming. For Shop the Look, OpenAI and Fanatics engineers used Codex to build custom recommendation tools that enrich catalog data, find compatible merchandise, evaluate looks and generate outfits per product. The companies said the first 50 looks were tested in less than a day; after a few days of review and iteration, Fanatics approved a minimum viable product the same week and scaled the approach across thousands of products. After testing recommendations across roughly 30,000 MLB products, OpenAI said the new experience delivered 10% higher engagement than the prior Shop the Look. Those figures are OpenAI and Fanatics' own measurements.

CNBC, reporting the same day, put the catalog challenge in commercial context. Fanatics said it offers more than 1.5 million unique SKUs across league and team sites, manufactures more than 45 million items a year and sells into more than 180 countries. Team merchandise remains the company's largest revenue source, CNBC reported.

"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." — Justin Tsai, Chief Product Officer, Fanatics Commerce, Fanatics

Tsai told CNBC that average shopping sessions routinely ran more than 30 minutes and that Fanatics releases upwards of a thousand new products each week — too fast for traditional photo-shoot curation, especially on championship gear. Random cross-team suggestions also fail the fan test.

"Nobody who is a Los Angeles Dodgers fan wants to be matched with a San Francisco Giants item … team and player alignment is extremely important in our world." — Justin Tsai, Chief Product Officer, Fanatics Commerce, Fanatics

Tsai told CNBC the rollout produced a 10% increase in views of recommended items and that suggested pieces give shoppers "more conviction" about what they plan to buy. Rosemary DeAragon, Head of Industry GTM, OpenAI, framed the work as the next step after years of stitching together personalization signals from purchase history, location and login state.

"In the past we were trying to stitch together something that would be good to show a customer. With AI, you can do more deterministic matching to do personalization in this next-level way." — Rosemary DeAragon, Head of Industry GTM, OpenAI

For leagues and clubs that already outsource e-commerce to Fanatics, the launch is less a new sponsorship category than a platform feature riding existing league-store inventory. It also extends OpenAI's retail push from ChatGPT shopping experiments into a sports merchandiser's production catalog — with published engagement metrics that will invite scrutiny against conversion and average-order-value results Fanatics did not disclose Monday.