The 2026 Korea E-commerce Fair ran for three days from September 17 at SETEC in Seoul. Some 250 companies set up booths, and around 20,000 online sellers were expected to attend. StyleRoom had a booth there too.
We were a team new to offline events. We had attended conferences like AWS, but we had never once run a booth at a trade fair. So we narrowed our goal. Instead of explaining the service down to the last detail, we would catch people's eye, let them try it themselves, and make them say "wow." We decided to do just those three things.
The Plan
What could we do as a development team? After much thought, the answer was to get people to the front of the booth, one way or another, and we chose a game to do it. We placed a monitor in the middle of the booth and put up a single game. Its name: "Find the Real Photo." The screen mixes lookbook and model photos from brands on the market with photos made by StyleRoom AI. All visitors have to do is pick out the real ones.
The rules were simple. Get even one photo wrong and the game ends on the spot. Get them right and you move up to the next round, and the higher the round, the more photos you see and the more real ones you have to find. You start by picking 1 out of 2, and each round adds one more photo. Regardless of ranking, we decided to give a Stanley tumbler to everyone who cleared the target round. The target we first set was round 10.
AI image generation is easy to tune out when someone explains it. We thought it would land faster if people picked for themselves, got it wrong, and watched a "StyleRoom AI" stamp land on the AI photo when the answer was revealed.
The booth walls told the same story. The banners and posters were shots from "Unseen to Unveiled," the campaign we created while preparing for this fair. A lookbook made with StyleRoom AI became the face of the booth as it was, which means visitors were already surrounded by AI photos before they even played the game.
Expectation vs. Reality
While preparing the booth, the team set its expectation at around 300 people over three days. We ordered 500 business cards to match.
500 business cards fell far short. We printed another 1,500, and over the three days all 2,000 were gone.
The game ran around 600 times on each of the three days, and the last day, Saturday, was the busiest.
The Line
Lay the records out in time order and you can see the scene in front of the booth. The median time between one game ending and the next game ending was 25 seconds. In other words, as soon as one game finished, the next one started almost without a break.
The shape of the crowd was different each day, too. Taking the number of games as an indirect measure of the crowd in front of the booth, it looks like this.
| Date | Busiest 30 min | Busiest hour | Shape of the day |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9.17 Thu | 10:30 · 66 games | 14:00 · 111 games | Two rushes, at 10:30 AM and 2 PM |
| 9.18 Fri | 10:30 · 61 games | 15:00 · 104 games | Two rushes, at 10:30 AM and 3 PM |
| 9.19 Sat | 10:30 · 12:00 · 70 games each | 12:00 · 128 games | 126 to 128 games per hour from 11:00 to 13:00 |
On all three days, the busiest moment was 10:30, thirty minutes after opening. On the weekdays there was a second rush in the afternoon, and on Saturday the booth stayed full around lunchtime.
The same scene shows up in what visitors to the booth wrote down.
"I looked it up, and people said this was the hottest spot at the fair, so I came."
Booth visitor"Young people were lining up to play."
Day-two visit review · Naver BlogOne watch and jewelry seller wrote that they came to see how far it could go for making real product content.
Visit review · Naver BlogWe saw a lot of interest not only from fashion but also from people at beauty companies.
CEO Oh Hyun-seok · Fashionbiz interviewLive Tuning
The game did not end the way we first designed it. We stood next to the game monitor and watched how visitors reacted. We had two goals: to give the best possible experience right there, and to plant the name "StyleRoom AI" in people's minds. Whenever we saw a sticking point, we fixed it and pushed the update right away, even in the middle of the event.
The Wow
We heard this a lot at the booth. It was not unusual for a group to take on the challenge together and all be knocked out in the very first round.
The records back up that reaction.
The first round asks you to pick the one real photo out of two. The photos are shown at their largest and there are the fewest choices, so it is the easiest round in the game. The share of games that cleared it was 55.8%. That is a question where even guessing with your eyes closed gets you 50%.
Sellers who work with photos every day could not tell them apart even with the two side by side. That was exactly the moment StyleRoom wanted to show at this booth. It is a moment no explanation can convey; you only understand it once you have gotten it wrong yourself.
Most Asked
After the game, what filled the booth was questions. These are the ones that came up most often over the three days.
"What is this place? Do you make clothes? Are you a studio?"
Because we wore staff T-shirts printed with lookbook images, many people asked whether we made clothes or ran a photo studio. We are neither. StyleRoom is an AI service that turns a seller's own clothing photos into lookbooks and model shots, with no photo shoot. The photos on the T-shirts were made with StyleRoom, too.
"Do you make the product detail page too?"
No. We make the images and videos that go on the detail page. It was one of the answers we gave most over the three days.
"Do I need photos of the clothes?"
Yes. StyleRoom starts from photos of the clothes you actually sell. It dresses an AI model in those clothes and creates lookbook shots with the background and pose you want.
"How is this different from other AI tools?"
This came from people who had used AI images themselves, and it was also the hardest question to answer in words. Instead, many people looked at the lookbook images and videos running on the booth monitor and convinced themselves, saying "The quality here is really high."
"Can you do underwear too?"
Yes. Underwear and swimwear can be made in a dedicated menu. We have put the details together in our guide to AI product photos for underwear and bikinis.
What We Took Home
At a trade fair, it is rare for a visit to lead straight to a payment on the spot. We did not expect that either.
What we hoped for is simpler. Some day a few weeks from now, a seller scrolling through their feed sees a StyleRoom ad and thinks, "Oh, that game where you guess the photo." We hope the 1,865 games become the seed of that memory.
The story of preparing the booth and getting through the three days is told in more detail in CEO Oh Hyun-seok's post "StyleRoom at the Korea E-commerce Fair: A Look Back" (Korean).
