HIGH POINT — Selling anything is about storytelling, and for big-ticket home items such as furniture, the retailer’s task is primarily one of visual storytelling. In the world of furniture and home e-commerce, digital imaging and visualization tools are star players in this high-tech game of show and sell.
While these new tools have created myriad opportunities for creative online merchandising, they have also raised the average buyer’s expectations for more and better visual information about their purchases.
Matt Gorniak, CEO of ThreeKit, a visual commerce platform whose partners in the furniture industry include LoveSac and Crate & Barrel, notes that customers increasingly expect tools that give them control over the visual story.
“There is a customer revolution that has been afoot for a while, but now it’s on,” he said. “With furniture, typically high-consideration products for lots of reasons — price is one of them, but also attributes of how different products come together and product configurations — customers have high expectations to visualize and engage with their purchases.”
In meeting this new and ever-evolving set of customer expectations, online furniture retailers are tasked with continually finding easier and more efficient ways to create product imagery and visual experiences.
Picture perfect
Before AI-enabled solutions emerged, the gold standard for furniture imagery was the traditional photoshoot with product staging, often followed by on-device 3D rendering to create marketing materials.
The advent of generative AI has shifted the paradigm across the industry, with several technology providers offering retailers integrated tools that can create large volumes of marketing imagery from a single silhouette.
These solutions must strike a three-way balance between speed, ease of use and graphical fidelity of the final render, but all seek to quickly generate imagery that is close to picture perfect.
When it comes to the speed of rendering in the context of retail-focused visualization tools, it’s important to remember that it’s a currency of seconds. According to one solutions provider, a few extra seconds on the back end is a fair trade-off for quality output on the front end.
French startup Presti AI — which partners with furniture companies in the U.S., including Wisteria, Caba Design and Brickmill Furniture, as well as major European retailers such as Maisons du Monde — developed a tool that gives retailers an easy and fast pipeline from silhouette to customizable lifestyle images.
“You just need an image of your product to be able to save it in any kind of setting. We developed our own AI model, and we’ve been able to reach a high level of image quality and flexibility to control the image,” company co-founder Hamza Bennis explained.
“For us, speed is not criteria number one because we don’t care if the image is done in half a second. We would rather ask the client, ‘Wait five seconds and get the highest quality.’
“So for us, our north star is quality. We are targeting full photorealism. Then, it needs to be easy to use. We don’t want the tool to be used only by technical people.”
By giving laypeople, such as an online retailer’s merchandising team, the ability to customize and tailor professional-grade lifestyle images, AI-enabled solutions can enable greater flexibility and customization in a business’s marketing materials.
“Retailers are embracing personalization in their imagery to better connect with their customers, exploring greater creativity in their settings and can more regularly update content as anything becomes possible,” Bennis noted.
Another strength of an AI-assisted workflow is the ability to operate in a wide variety of environments, including cluttered showrooms and retail floors.
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 crux of the testing we’ve been doing is making sure that this is going to work when there’s so much variable lighting and so many cluttered environments. When you have a sofa behind another sofa, and you need to create a pixel-perfect alpha channel mask for it,” Sethi said.
PyxMagic’s current focus is on product photography rather than lifestyle, although Sethi said the company is “definitely going to be touching and eating away at the fringes of that as well.”
“With this very first version of PyxMagic, the output is still photography: elevated silhouettes and groupings of products that can compete with decent studio output but be done rapidly, in situ, in a warehouse, anywhere.”
What you see is what you get
Augmented reality (AR) is another emerging technology that is coming to the forefront of visual commerce for the home and furniture industry.
In achieving the goal of personalized merchandising experiences to engage the customer, it is hard to conceive of a more effective backdrop than the customer’s own living room. The principal question for a retailer to ask themselves is where to involve AR in the process.
Gorniak at ThreeKit (whose AR solution is used by furniture retailers like American Leather and Burrow through its partnership with BigCommerce) notes that when the customer is at the point in their purchase consideration where AR most effectively comes into play, they have likely already chosen a product and are playing around with different customization and placement options within their own space.
“From a visual commerce perspective, when you’re at the AR side of it, you’re already very engaged with the product. You already have made choices. It’s about having the customers be able to get inspired and explore.
“It’s about catching people earlier, which we do with visual discovery, or the ability to very quickly explore products, get inspired by them and get them down that rabbit hole,” before AR comes into play, he explained.
These tools have another knock-on benefit: significantly increasing buyer confidence and reducing the rates of costly returns, which is of particular interest to the furniture industry.
“If you sell high-consideration products without embracing visual commerce, you’re really doing yourself a disservice as it pertains to returns, which can be significantly reduced,” Gorniak said.
But he cautioned that the visualization experiences provided to customers must be high-quality for this benefit to be fully realized. “You have to really go for high quality because what you see has to be the thing you get. It cannot be an approximation of what you are getting.”
The ability to create merchandising experiences in a customer’s living room, while providing considerable value in terms of fewer returns and increased conversions, also forces retailers to grapple with increased customer expectations.
Raffi Holzer, co-founder of AI-powered visual design tool Palazzo, which launched out of beta earlier this month, believes that the general public’s expectations for quality visual experiences are quite high and patience is often low.
“For professionals, there’s a stage at which quick ideation is very useful, whereas very often consumers want that immediate gratification. They want it to be perfect right off the bat,” Holzer noted.
VR on your radar
Slightly further on the technological horizon, but still worth keeping an eye on for furniture retailers, are truly immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences.
The advent of headsets like the Apple Vision Pro has made the hardware necessary for these experiences available to the general public, but they are far from the level of ubiquity that would make widespread adoption an attractive value proposition for most retailers. They are also expensive, as is the development process for experiences tailored to these devices.
“The trend today for furniture retailers is to decrease their content creation costs,” Bennis with Presti said. “VR creates significant challenges because it is quite expensive to implement.”
Given this higher cost of entry, it tracks that VR experiences are primarily being implemented by large retailers such as Walmart, which launched its Realm virtual shopping platform earlier this year.
Gorniak at ThreeKit believes that VR may have more immediate potential applications for furniture and home retail, but only at the very top end of the market.
“For very high-consideration, high-stakes purchases like high-end furniture, VR could potentially be an unlock, especially as the devices become easier to use and more accessible,” he predicted.
Even if the mass market implications of VR might be a few years down the road, retailers can be ready for them by implementing robust product visualization solutions that can easily be integrated into these tools when they become more widespread.
“By doing visual commerce, you are actually hedging your bets because if you can solve for your products and your scenes and everything being represented picture-perfectly, you’re automatically ready for VR,” Gorniak said.
“It takes time to get ready for it, and once that shoe drops, you are kind of behind already.”