Alice H. Chang is Perfect’s founder, the CEO and Chairwoman of the Board since its inception in June 2015. Alice bought AI & AR digital tech innovations to the fashion and beauty industries to transform physical product trials into digital experiences. Alice envisioned a reality to build the world’s leading virtual beauty platform. Now, she made her vision a reality by creating more than 350 major beauty brands and Perfect Corp’s technology is adopted by retailers, to offer virtual try-on makeup and shopping experiences across all consumer touchpoints.
Alice was born in Taiwan in 1961, in the middle of a decades-long stretch of martial law. Her parents served in the military before becoming government bureaucrats. They expected her to become a teacher, but instead she studied business administration at National Taiwan University and got a bank job. This was the period she started wearing suits and experimenting with makeup for the first time to show herself before YouTube videos.
With the rise in technology and internet, Alice identified a myriad of possibilities in the online realm and jumped into a career in the IT industry, where she recognized the power and opportunity presented by technology. In 1990’s she took an investment banking job at Citibank and after 2 years, she joined anti-virus software company Trend Micro to help them restructure and prepare for an IPO. She took up finance, operations and marketing. With her husband she started an entrepreneurial venture called CyberLink, a rare software company for manufacturing computer chips and other hardware. Nearly two decades, she served as CEO to help advance technology for the enjoyment of people. However, she noticed that her company’s PC sales started to slow down with the increased number of smartphones. Smartphones made her increasingly fond of taking selfies to share with her friends and family, but there was no great way to touch up images. Later she came up with the practical application of augmented reality (AR) and facial recognition technologies in the beauty space. In 2014, she created a free app called YouCam Perfect, to perfect selfies by whitening the teeth and erasing the dark spots. It garnered 17 million downloads with zero marketing.
The demand increased and She released a second app, called YouCam Makeup, with the slight modification of the previous one, where the users can add lipstick, mascara, eyeshadow and other virtual makeup to their photos. In 2015, Alice took 80 employees (mostly engineers) and spun off the company from CyberLink to Perfect Corp. she focused on re-imaging the consumer beauty experience through advanced technology that helps individuals in their beauty journey. She began pitching the technology to beauty brands, making 19 trips to New York, Paris, Tokyo and Shanghai in a single year to push the purchase button by customers. Alice says “If you try more, you buy more. It solves the pain point of every beauty lover.” She tags this phrase to increase the purchase among customers.
Perfect Corp’s advantage lies in its face-tracking technology that creates a three-dimensional web by identifying 200 facial attributes in real time. The technology can identify over 90,000 skin tones and makes it the most inclusive in the industry. It has over 500,000 products in its database and can display various textures, like shiny or matte. Its ‘Beauty 3.0’ AI and AR solutions offer customers the power to experiment with features like AI Product Recommendations, AI Smart Shade Finder, AI Skin Diagnostic, and AI Live Hair Multi-Color Effect. The YouCam uniqueness lies in the unmatched level of accuracy from virtual try-ons which seamlessly replicates real-life beauty try-ons.
As a beauty tech queen, Alice empowers shoppers to preview purchases before they pull the trigger, driving sales, and becoming a regular part of online commerce. She always recognises the services to bridge the gap between the beauty industry and the beauty consumers in any challenging time. She helps beauty brands connect with their consumer despite the physical divide, to maintain customer engagements through digital means. Alice always believes that AI will continue to drive the next big upgrade to the consumer digital journey, and deliver personalised products with AI technologies.