![]() Market holidays and trading hours provided by Copp Clark Limited. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices Copyright S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and/or its affiliates. Standard & Poor’s and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. Dow Jones: The Dow Jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by DJI Opco, a subsidiary of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and have been licensed for use to S&P Opco, LLC and CNN. Chicago Mercantile: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. US market indices are shown in real time, except for the S&P 500 which is refreshed every two minutes. Your CNN account Log in to your CNN account It took about 20 minutes to complete a coat in a honey-yellow hue, which is twice as long as the company’s goal. “It’s kind of like adding fast-casual restaurants or vending machines in a world that only has sit-down restaurants,” she said.Ĭlockwork’s robots aren’t perfect: The first time I visited, the pipette that pushes out polish appeared to clog after painting a few nails, and several of my nails were painted so poorly around the edges that the machine’s attendant fixed them by hand. Similarly, Apte sees Clockwork not as a replacement for a traditional manicure, but as another beauty service. “There’s an aspect here of, if I had the time to go in and sit down and have the full experience, I would do that, but I also want the option to very quickly go in and use something like that,” she said. Additionally, Clockwork’s nail-painting experience is one more choice that retailers can give customers, she said. As a result, consumers are becoming more comfortable seeing these sorts of things in stores. Kelsie Marian, a senior director analyst at Gartner who covers large retailers and the ways they use technology, noted that retailers have been experimenting with robots for years, especially for tasks like inventory management and price checking. The machine uses a disposable pipette that draws polish from tiny, prefilled bottles Apte said that she and Feldstein originally experimented with using brushes to apply polish, but eventually eschewed them for a host of reasons (brushes tend to harden and can harbor bacteria if they aren’t cleaned properly, for instance). It might not sound that complicated, but Apte said variations in the steepness of people’s nails - combined with the changing viscosity of nail polish, depending on how it’s applied - make it a challenging endeavor for a robot. This information is then used by algorithms that figure out things such as how (and how fast) the machine’s polish-dispensing pipette should move to apply paint to your nail.Ĭlockwork also labels and adds these nail pictures to a dataset that’s used to improve the company’s nail-painting software. ![]() ![]() Apte said those images are used to create a 3-D point cloud showing the shape of the nail, and this data is used to figure out where the edges of your nail are located. You place a digit on a finger rest and slide it into the machine, where two cameras rapidly take about 100 pictures of the nail. To paint your nails, Clockwork’s machines rely on cameras, data, and algorithms. “I feel like most people who want to do beauty on a regular basis don’t always have time for it,” Apte told CNN Business.Īpte said she came up with the idea for Clockwork, which she founded with Aaron Feldstein in 2018, in part to solve her own problem.ĬNN Business Senior Tech writer Rachel Metz recently tested Clockwork's fingernail-painting robot at a local Target store. Clockwork’s machines are an attempt to make such robots more common in everyday life they’re aimed at people who want something in between a sit-down manicure (which can be costly and time-consuming) and do-it-yourself nail painting (which, if you’re like me, can be extremely messy). Robots have been common in commercial settings for a long time, but they mostly remain a novelty with consumers (you may have encountered the occasional French fry-making robot, barista robot, or delivery robot, to name a few). Fingernail painting costs $10 (though Clockwork is currently offering first-time customers $2 off), and is meant to take about 10 minutes or less. Clockwork CEO and founder Renuka Apte said the machines will be added to three more Target stores in the Dallas-Fort Worth area on May 11. Jesse Meria/Courtesy ClockworkĬlockwork robots were added to three Target stores (two in the San Francisco Bay Area, one in Target’s corporate home state of Minnesota), starting in February, as part of a small-scale test to see how shoppers take to this sort of on-the-go beauty service. ![]() Clockwork's fingernail-painting robot takes pictures of each fingernail then pipes polish onto the nail, leaving no brush lines. ![]()
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