Daria Nepriakhina: "Custom illustrations key to Vendora's growth in low-trust market"

In the industry of startups where growth is pacing rapidly, we need to keep our pace with it. This shift is also felt by Daria Nepriakhina, the co-founder and head of product (CPO) at Vendora, a C2C marketplace that is currently expanding in Central Europe. Daria, who started as a part-time illustrator with a background in UI/UX design, initially created illustrations for Vendora herself. As the Vendora continues to grow, the need for illustration on digital content promotion also arises making it challenging to manage each one individually.

I discussed with Daria on keeping up the pace with the growth of each startup company and how a personal AI model is a breather of fresh air not only to overcome the issue, yet also to seize the opportunity to enhance creativity with greater efficiency.

Tonia Samsonova: Let's start a bit with who you are and what is your role at the job?

Daria Nepriakhina: I am the co-founder and head of product at Vendora, a C2C marketplace currently active in Greece, Cyprus and Bulgaria, we are expanding within the Central Europe region. It’s fully transactional, still on a startup scale, and we have been doing this for about seven years.

I personally have my background in UI/UX design and for a long time I was doing some of the design work for Vendora. Here, I was trying to add more illustrations to make a nicer product function, but as the company grew, the need for illustration just got out of control because it takes so much time and effort.

For example, any empty screens and so on would have some illustrations. Since I'm in a role where I need to drive the product, I just don't have time for this. So we have been also considering training an AI model ourselves, but instead we decided to use exactly and the service came in very handy.

TS: Can you talk a bit more about this? Where did you get the initial illustrations?

The initial ones were me all this time. It was manageable at first but as the team in the company grows, I have other things to do and it's very hard to find somebody who can do the same style of illustration. The style is not an easy one to just copy. So that is where the challenge is and now you see how it is a problem. From there, exactly solves the problem for us like 80%. While some minor edits are needed, this process can be scaled a bit more.

TS: How did you find exactly and discover it?

DN: We firstly tried to train a model on our illustrations. It didn't work out well, then our founder found exactly and sent it to me. I tried it for an evening and I subscribed immediately afterwards. It was just that everybody in the team knows that this is a problem, so everybody kind of was already on lookout for something like what you guys are doing.

At the start, we had enough initial illustrations to pre-train it, so there were no concerns there. It's exactly our style, so it's really good. We were joking just this morning about how we can endlessly generate happy people in all variations, and that solves the problem. Also, we are not worried that somebody would steal our style or anything because the style out there is very varied.

TS: Talking about the founder, how did you built Vendora and what the startup is about?

DN: Our founder, he was actually a co-founder of Marktplaats. At the time, it was the biggest C2C site in the Netherlands which then was sold to eBay, so they had a very successful exit there. He kind of is very well-known as the marketplace guy. Some years ago, he was coming to Greece to just basically be invited by the local Dutch embassy to help local entrepreneurs as a mentor. From there, he started to come more often in Greece and he realised that the market is actually low trust. Somehow, people are not into secondhand and we always know that, especially person to person trade is typically in the first top ten most visited websites per-country. This was not the case in Greece at the time.

Then he decided that there is an opportunity to do something with this and there is definitely a market there ready for some disruption. So he started Vendora at the time and I was helping him more on the UX and design part. As it started to grow, it changed quite a bit because we started from just a classic C2C site, then with the pandemic and everything going on, we went to a fully transactional, horizontal marketplace. So that means that anybody can sell anything on Vendora.

Now it is not just second hand as it goes broader than that and it's all facilitated by an escrow service. We have very strong customer support because for us, the customer is king. As the company grows, we realise that our ambition is to scale things up as we roll out in Cyprus and recently, Bulgaria. Both markets are doing pretty well becoming a cross-border, person-to-person trade. We have more ambitions going forward, but we're also trying to improve the product.

TS: Can you explain a bit what exactly the problem that you are solving and how did you internally set?

DN: As we grow, we have too much illustration work that needs to be done and it's not just the product illustrations, but also we are running a lot of campaigns with partners. For example, a new shipping campaign, a new discount, a new service. All of this, usually they need to have an illustration because we update our users. There is a push notification with an illustration and there is also a slider. So there are a lot of elements that need to happen and the more we grow, the more the amount of work grows, and the less time you have for these things.

TS: In that case, how many illustrations do you need at Vendora?

DN: For us, the problem started to arise more in the social media part where all of it requires illustrations. This was also followed by how we wanted to enrich our product with more illustrations and more nicer things so that it's not looking empty. Based on the content calendar, I think at least we need two illustrations per month. Aside from that, we also have push notifications, at least one campaign running a month. If we have events, then there are print materials. So that's flash, it's gunners. It could be quite a few at once that are needed.

On the product side, we did a sprint to cover all the empty states in the product and that was quite an effort. Sadly, at the time we didn't have your tool yet. So now that we have exactly as our tool, I am considering more things that we can cover because we also want to upgrade and bring in the same cohesive illustration style to our product.

TS: Which other AI tools were you using at that time?

DN: We tried the open-source ones. We tried Lexica, GPT, Gemini, and DreamStudio. The problem is that the style transfer doesn't always work as we have a very unusual type of style. While there are plenty of anime, realistic, or icon styles, it just didn't work for us but your model is way closer to our style, already matching it properly.

I think a lot of designers would find this super useful because the problem is that we have all these similar tools. These designers want to have a certain style themselves, and that is something that is not so easy to change. You cannot get them to suddenly adopt your style. We tried others, but it just becomes a style that you see everywhere I believe designers will find exactly useful because of that.

TS: Do you have concerns about using AI in your work?

DN: We are very much AI-driven and we use AI for so many things. We are only 22 people and operate in three countries. Our whole motto is to optimise everything and to supercharge ourselves with tools, as much as possible. So as soon as something is coming that solves our problem, we jump on it.