If you have a design in mind for a piece of jewellery, generative AI now lets you create a realistic rendering of it.

The start-up Arcade wants to take it a step further and let you buy a physical version.

The company launched its AI product creation platform in September with the promise to “turn your thoughts into things.” Customers are able to generate jewellery designs as if they were using an AI tool like Midjourney or Dall-E — except in this case they can choose different options for sizing and materials, such as sterling silver or 14k yellow gold, get a price for their item and actually have it made. Depending on the piece, it takes about two weeks, according to co-founder Mariam Naficy.

Naficy is a familiar name in entrepreneurial circles. She founded the early online cosmetics retailer Eve.com, which she sold in 2000, and then tapped into the burgeoning creator economy in 2007 with Minted, a design marketplace where users can buy items like holiday cards and art prints from independent makers. AI-generated products are her next big bet.

“Once I started seeing Midjourney and Dall-E images come out, I thought people are going to want to own those things,” she said.

She recruited her co-founder, Will Zhuk, from OpenAI to lead the technical side, and with her venture studio Heretic, they began creating products with AI and sending the images to manufacturers to see if they could produce faithful reproductions. They could, and Arcade was born. The company has raised $17 million from investors including Reid Hoffman and Brit Morin of Offline Ventures, Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, Karlie Kloss, Colin Kaepernick and others.

If Arcade’s premise sounds simple, making it work wasn’t. It shows both the potential in AI-generated products and how much labour is required behind the scenes to build an AI platform shoppers can use.

A strength of generative AI is that it can allow anyone to easily produce realistic imagery, for example, but that imagery might also defy the laws of reality. That’s not ideal if your aim is to create manufacturable products. Anyone who has played around with AI image generators also knows how difficult it can be to write prompts that yield the results you want. Shoppers, however, probably won’t spend a lot of time figuring out what to type in to create the clasp that attaches a charm to a chain (called a bail) and get it to look modern rather than like an antique.

Arcade had to train its AI — a mix of open-source models including Midjourney and Stable Diffusion — specifically to deal with these sorts of issues. When users type their ideas into Arcade, it also runs their text through a “prompt layer” that translates it into language that will yield the best output while blocking other outcomes. Arcade only wants the AI to generate images of jewellery, and doesn’t want it reproducing brand trademarks or sexually explicit content — some of the first things people tried to create, according to Naficy. Similarly, if a user uploads an image, Arcade will create AI-generated variations but not an exact recreation.

“The hardest part to build was the detection models that size the product,” Naficy said. “The volumetric model decides how big it is, how much it weighs and then applies pricing algorithms that we design.”

Those prices, which vary based on the design and materials, had to be negotiated with Arcade’s supply chain. Its supplier network consists of a dozen producers, ranging from individual artisans to small workshops, and spans locations from the US to India, with more producers to come. The platform uses an automatic routing mechanism to choose which supplier will make each item, based on the team’s ratings of who it deems best at that type of work. One might excel with enamel pieces; another could be a master with gems.

Each time a shopper places an order, the chosen supplier will get the AI-generated design and recreate it in physical form from the image alone. Users’ designs are available for others to buy as well, letting Arcade double as a marketplace where creators can earn a commission.

“From first impressions, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m in love with this platform,’” said Karine Hsu, founder of creative firm Slope Agency, who ended up spending a couple of hours on Arcade when it launched coming up with designs, including a pair of earrings based on celebrity hippo Moo Deng.

Hsu, a self-proclaimed jewellery lover who said she regularly plays with new AI tools, liked that she could generate jewellery with nothing more than a text prompt and that it would actually look nice. Though she ultimately didn’t buy anything, she said, because she was moving between cities and didn’t know where to have the items shipped. Her main criticism of Arcade was that, in her experience, prices were either around $150 for cheaper pieces or jumped straight to $500, with few options in between.

The generative-AI boom has spawned several companies trying to wrestle the technology into different types of user-friendly creative tools. A number of start-ups are using it to build design platforms for fashion, and Arcade isn’t the only one thinking about letting consumers turn AI designs into physical goods. The app Off/Script, which launched last year, allows users to mock up products from clothing to home decor. But they only go into production if they meet certain conditions: A design needs to collect 100 likes to be considered, and then the team assigns a sales price and order quantity. If the item then gets enough pre-orders, Off/Script will produce it.

Arcade wants to create a scenario where shoppers can see their AI designs and turn them into reality with a credit card and the click of a button.

“There’s something very shocking about that experience,” Naficy said. “I feel like it can be very addictive actually.”

The company is already thinking of how to expand. It’s branching into materials including platinum and lab-grown diamonds, and plans to launch engagement rings with diamond certification. It’s also working on upgraded features for customers and suppliers, like an editing tool so shoppers can tweak their designs. Eventually it could offer additional manufacturing techniques, too, like 3D printing.

Could the company one day apply the idea to fashion?

“I just really think that would be the very last thing we would do,” Naficy said. Producing one-off pieces of individually sized apparel isn’t easy or cost-effective.

Arcade chose to sell jewellery because it “would be more viral,” according to Naficy. People would go out wearing statement pieces they created themselves. “Also, you could bring it to life on TikTok and other social media platforms,” she added, “and critically, we thought Gen-Zers would be interested.”