John Imah Wants to Build Fashion’s Next Intelligence Layer

The SPREEAI co-founder has spent his life reading patterns and now has the intelligence he believes can help shopping understand the individual.

Growing up in a Nigerian-American family in Dallas, Texas, John Imah had a penchant for taking things apart. At seven, it was the family computer. He dismantled it and eventually managed to put it back together. As a teen, he taught himself to code and learn musical instruments. Back then, he was already thinking about patterns and possibilities, and then business and technology. His childhood of tinkering with the computer and learning music scores, for him, was only the beginning.

“I have never seen myself as belonging to only one world,” says Imah, sharing how his earlier interests encouraged him to learn about scale, fashion, culture, and human behaviour. “My Nigerian-American upbringing and my mother’s extraordinary sense of style were teaching me how identity can be communicated without saying a word. My life has really been about bringing those worlds together.”

Clothing is also something that Imah does and constructs himself. “Fashion is one of the few art forms you actually inhabit. A painting hangs on a wall and music fills a room, but fashion moves through the world on a human body,” Imah says. He also adds that shape, color, texture, and proportion can carry memory, identity, and ambition before a person ever speaks. He continues, “That is why clothing has never felt like decoration to me. At its best, it is authorship.”

His ideas about identity have shaped his appearance at the Met Gala. In 2025, he wore a custom Sergio Hudson lavender look inspired by his Nigerian heritage, technology, and his late mother, whose roots were in Delta State. 

He says, “My first Met Gala was deeply personal. The hand-embroidered overcoat echoed the architecture of a computer motherboard, while the traditional Edo beads and Nigerian details grounded it in lineage. It was about carrying my history into the future rather than choosing between the two.”

In 2026, he returned with Charles Harbison. “I wanted to move that story forward. The champagne-toned ensemble combined a sculptural evening cape, a constellation suit, a gold-encrusted Matrix vest and a robotic glove. I wanted it to feel like West African royalty imagined through a futuristic lens: ceremonial, powerful, and still unmistakably human.”

That intersection of fashion, culture, technology, and new ideas is where Imah has found himself most at home. It is also where SPREEAI, an AI fashion commerce platform, comes in. For him, it’s where he sees artificial intelligence as compatible with the emotional world of fashion. The technology is designed around a fairly human frustration with online shopping: figuring out whether a garment will actually work for you. Questions such as: “Will it fit?” “Will it look the way you imagined?” “Does it make sense with the things already hanging in your closet?” “Is it actually your style or did you simply like the picture?”

SPREEAI brings together tools for virtual try-on, fit and size prediction, styling, personalization, wardrobe intelligence and product understanding in an effort to make those decisions feel less like guesswork. But for Imah, the larger idea is not really about making shopping faster, it is about making it more personal.

He explains, “People often treat fashion as emotional and technology as rational, but great work in both begins with imagination and ends with precision. SPREEAI grew naturally from that conversation, but it is only one chapter in the larger question that continues to drive me: how can technology expand human creativity without replacing the instinct, craftsmanship, and individuality that make fashion meaningful?”

For Imah, SPREEAI exists because he sees technology as most useful when it helps people feel seen, reduces uncertainty, and gives them greater confidence to express who they are or who they are becoming. He notes, “A designer turns an idea into form; an engineer turns possibility into a system.”

For more information, visit SPREEAI’s official website.