Excelsior businesses get AI-generated makeovers
Startup funds Mission Street paint jobs to promote designs based on image database
San Francisco’s Excelsior district — a largely residential neighborhood south of Interstate 280, anchored by a southerly stretch of Mission Street — probably isn’t what comes first to mind for most people when they think of the city’s booming AI scene.
But for a handful of small businesses in the area, artificial intelligence is now literally splashed across their storefronts. Over the past week, they’ve all been repainted with designs created with an AI tool from Spanish software startup Freepik, which opened a San Francisco office seven months ago to be at the center of the AI industry.
“It’s the worldwide hub of technology,” said Freepik CEO Joaquín Cuenca.
Freepik, which footed the bill for the paint jobs, operates from a spruced-up former auto retail shop and cellphone store at Fifth and Howard streets that sports an AI-generated paint job of its own. The company offers customers a range of tools to generate designs based on a huge database of images.
Repainting the facades of three businesses on a well-used and bustling stretch of Mission Street may not single-handedly fix what ails the area. But it’s a vivid illustration of the tech industry, and AI in particular, creeping further into the everyday life of the city.
The publicity-oriented paint jobs were a repeat of a similar maneuver the company used to attract attention in its home town of Malaga. That effort saw Freepik choose businesses in La Trinidad, a somewhat “beaten down” neighborhood, in Cuenca’s words, that was in need of a
bit of AI-assisted color.
That doesn’t quite describe the Excelsior. Though it has a grittier feel than some other commercial and residential neighborhoods, it’s also warmer and livelier, bursting with many immigrant-owned businesses such as pupuserias, car repair shops, hardware stores, bakeries and barbers that huddle together along a nine-block stretch of Mission.
It has a Queens-in-San Francisco kind of feel, the type of place residents can get just about anything they need and never have to venture too far from home or see an unfamiliar face.
Freepik said it chose the Excelsior because of its diverse community and working-class feel. The company says it’s helping “revitalize the area through design.”
The Excelsior businesses that took part in the paint scheme — Razo’s Barber Shop, Excelsior Coffee and Restaurante Familiar — were mostly thrilled with the results.
Erik Razo, owner of the eponymous barbershop, said Freepik reached out to him about a month ago. He penciled out an initial design himself, a stylish if somewhat busy sign chock full of barber poles, San Francisco iconography, and tools of the trade such as scissors and clippers, and then handed it off to designer Jenny Park, who used Freepik’s tools to realize the final version.
Now the shop’s formerly black brick facade has been sprayed with a Golden Gatebridge hued reddish orange. Like a fresh trim, its main sign boasts scissors in place of straight razors, complete with an arching golden scroll over a rendering of the city’s most famous bridge.
“I think it will definitely bring in more business,” Razo said a few days before the job was finished. The freebie from Freepik was also a bargain compared with the $15,000 Razo spent the last time he refreshed his signage.
A few doors down, Excelsior Coffee’s facade used to feature a black, white and yellow fractal design. Now that’s been replaced
“I think it will definitely bring in more business.” Erik Razo, barbershop owner
with a matte black surface with “Excelsior” displayed in stacked yellow letters.
“It doesn’t look AI-generated,” said customer Lawrence Kao on Wednesday at the unveiling of the signs. He was standing outside the coffee shop waiting for a matcha drink and gazing up at the minimalist black and yellow exterior.
“I don’t love it,” he said after thinking about it a while.
Designer Arina Pozdnyak used Freepik’s software to overhaul the neighboring Restaurante Familiar’s orange and red motif with the white and blue of the flag of El Salvador. She also input sketches of her own into the program to get ideas for the tropical images from the owners’ homeland that cover space inside and out: renderings of volcanoes and coconuts, tropical birds and churches.
Jorge Ramos and Flor Álvarez, who run the restaurant, said in Spanish they are hopeful the refresh would bring in more businesses. “We wanted to bring the colors of our country” to the fore, Álvarez said. Already, Ramos said, people have been popping their heads in and taking pictures, thinking a new business had landed overnight.
Not every resident was swayed by the design.
“Brown would have been better,” said Anna So, who lives across the street, standing in her doorway selling odds and ends while dancing to upbeat music and chatting up passersby under an umbrella.
She seemed unfazed by the AI element. “The haircut place looks good,” she said of Razo’s.
Some businesses on the block passed on the opportunity for an AI makeover, said Mel Flores, who works for the Excelsior Action Group, a nonprofit that helps local businesses get city grants and other investments.
The owner of Glaze Donut on the corner wasn’t interested in the project when approached by Freepik, Flores said. And it being the middle of tax season, American Financial Services, next to the coffee shop, declined the offer in favor of handling a packed lobby of clients, Flores said.
That was despite a little nudging. “It’s free, I told him,” Flores said.
This colorful, polyglot sector of the city festooned with murals of everything from martial artists to the Last Supper hasn’t benefited from the injection of venture capital dollars that has powered the boom and bust cycle elsewhere across town.
And during the pandemic, it took a hit like many other parts of the city. Taxable revenue from the bustling stretch of Mission is still down by about a fifth compared to what it was in 2019.
“When the economy is struggling and business revenue is down across the city, this is the kind of help these businesses need,” said District 11 Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, standing inside Restaurante Familiar during the Wednesday unveiling.
AI-generated paint jobs aren’t likely to bring back the roughly $10 million in annual taxable revenue lost during the pandemic that has yet to return.
But the new veneers are indicative of the AI industry’s evolving relationship with the city and the region, by filling empty offices downtown, inspiring symphonies and molding other aspects of life, big and small.