HIGHLIGHT — Selling anything is about storytelling, and with expensive home items like furniture, the retailer’s job is primarily to tell stories visually. In the world of furniture and home e-commerce, digital imaging and visualization tools are key players in this high-tech game of showing and selling.
While these new tools have created countless opportunities for creative online merchandising, they have also increased the average shopper’s expectations for more and better visual information about their purchases.
Matt Gorniak, CEO of ThreeKit, a visual commerce platform whose furniture industry partners include LoveSac and Crate & Barrel, notes that customers increasingly expect tools that give them control over the visual story.
“There’s a customer revolution that’s been going on for some time, but now it’s in full swing,” he said. “Furniture tends to be a product that requires a lot of attention for many reasons – price is one of them, but also features, how different products fit together and product configurations – and customers have high expectations when it comes to visualizing and engaging with their purchases.”
To meet these new and ever-evolving customer expectations, online furniture retailers are faced with the challenge of finding ever simpler and more efficient ways to create product images and visual experiences.
Beautiful
Before AI-powered solutions came along, the gold standard for imaging furniture was the traditional photoshoot with product staging, often followed by on-device 3D rendering to create marketing materials.
The advent of generative artificial intelligence has caused a paradigm shift across the industry, with several technology providers offering retailers integrated tools that can create large volumes of marketing images from a single silhouette.
These solutions must strike a triple balance between speed, ease of use and graphical fidelity of the final rendering, but all aim to produce near-perfect images quickly.
When it comes to rendering speed in the context of retail visualization tools, it is important to remember that it is a currency of seconds. According to one solution provider, a few extra seconds on the backend side is a fair trade-off for high-quality output on the frontend side.
French startup Presti AI – which works with furniture companies in the US such as Wisteria, Caba Design and Brickmill Furniture, as well as major European retailers such as Maisons du Monde – has developed a tool that offers retailers an easy and quick path from silhouette to customizable lifestyle imagery.
“You only need an image of your product to be able to save it in any environment. We developed our own AI model and were able to achieve high image quality and flexibility in image control,” explained company co-founder Hamza Bennis.
“For us, speed is not the most important criterion because we don’t care if the image is ready in half a second. We prefer to ask the customer: ‘Wait five seconds and get the highest quality.'”
“Quality is our guiding star. We aim for complete photorealism. It also has to be easy to use. We don’t want the tool to be used only by technical people.”
By giving non-professionals, such as an online retailer’s merchandising team, the ability to customize and design lifestyle images at a professional scale, AI-powered solutions can add flexibility and customization to a company’s marketing materials.
“Retailers are increasingly personalizing their images to better connect with their customers, allowing more creativity in the design of their environments, and updating content more regularly as new opportunities arise,” Bennis noted.
Another strength of an AI-powered workflow is the ability to work in a wide variety of environments, including crowded showrooms and retail spaces.
Gaurav Sethi, co-founder of visual merchandising technology provider Pyxd, whose AI-integrated product photography solution PyxMagic launched earlier this month, said this flexibility is a key focus of his company’s imaging solution.
“The core of our testing is to make sure this works even in very variable lighting conditions and very cluttered environments. For example, if you have a sofa behind another sofa and you need to create a pixel-perfect alpha channel mask for that,” Sethi said.
PyxMagic’s current focus is on product photography rather than lifestyle, although Sethi said the company will “definitely explore the fringes of that as well.”
“In this very first version of PyxMagic, the output is still photography: raised silhouettes and product groupings that rival proper studio output, but can be created quickly, on location, in a warehouse, anywhere.”
What you see is what you get
Augmented Reality (AR) is another new technology that is playing an important role in visual commerce in the home and furniture industry.
To achieve the goal of creating personalized merchandising experiences and delighting the customer, it is hard to imagine a more effective setting than the customer’s living room. The most important question a retailer must ask is where to incorporate AR into the process.
Gorniak of ThreeKit (whose AR solution is used by furniture retailers like American Leather and Burrow through its partnership with Big Commerce) points out that by the time customers are at the point in their purchase consideration where AR comes into play most effectively, they’ve likely already decided on a product and are experimenting with different customization and placement options in their own space.
“From a visual commerce perspective, when you’re on the AR side, you’re already very engaged with the product. You’ve already made decisions. It’s about letting customers get inspired and explore.
“It’s about reaching people sooner, which we do with visual discovery, or the ability to explore products very quickly, get inspired by them and take them down the rabbit hole” before AR comes into play, he explained.
These tools have another advantage: They significantly increase buyer confidence and reduce the rate of costly returns, which is of particular interest to the furniture industry.
“If you sell high-interest products without leveraging visual commerce, you’re doing yourself a disservice in terms of returns, which can be significantly reduced,” Gorniak said.
However, he cautioned that in order to fully exploit this advantage, the visualization experiences offered to customers must be high quality. “You really have to go for high quality because what you see has to be what you get. It can’t just be an approximation of what you get.”
The ability to create merchandising experiences in the customer’s living room while providing significant added value in the form of fewer returns and increased sales is also forcing retailers to address increased customer expectations.
Raffi Holzer, co-founder of AI-powered visual design tool Palazzo, which completed its beta phase earlier this month, believes that public expectations for high-quality visual experiences are quite high and patience is often low.
“For professionals, there’s a phase where quick idea generation is very useful, whereas consumers very often want that instant gratification. They want it to be perfect from the start,” Holzer noted.
VR on your radar
A little further down the technological horizon, but still worthwhile for furniture retailers, are truly immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences.
With the introduction of headsets like the Apple Vision Pro, the hardware required to deliver these experiences has become available to the general public, but they are still far from widespread enough for broad adoption to be an attractive value proposition for most retailers. They are also expensive, as is the process of developing experiences tailored to these devices.
“The trend among furniture retailers today is to reduce the cost of creating content,” said Presti’s Bennis. “VR presents us with significant challenges because it is quite expensive to implement.”
Given these higher entry costs, it’s understandable that VR experiences are being adopted primarily by major retailers like Walmart, which launched its Realm virtual shopping platform earlier this year.
ThreeKit’s Gorniak believes VR may have more immediate potential applications in the furniture and home furnishings retail sector, but only at the top end of the market.
“For purchases that involve very high costs, such as high-end furniture, VR could potentially be an enabler, especially as the devices become easier to use and more accessible,” he predicted.
While it will be several years before VR hits the mass market, retailers can prepare by implementing robust product visualization solutions that will easily integrate with these tools as they become more widely available.
“By doing visual commerce, you are playing it safe because if you can optimally represent your products and scenes and everything is perfectly rendered, you are automatically ready for VR,” Gorniak said.
“It takes time to prepare for it, and when the hammer falls, you’re already a bit behind.”
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