A leading U.S. furnishings manufacturer, Furniture Brands operates more than a dozen well-known brands, including Broyhill, Lane, Thomasville, Drexel Heritage, Hickory Chair and Pearson.

Marketing home furnishings is an image-intensive and photo-driven undertaking. Many well-conceived visuals are required to communicate the nuances of each piece of furniture, from craftsmanship to how well it plays with other pieces in an actual room.

Working with about 2,700 new photos each month, Furniture Brands sought to overhaul its labor-intensive image production and management process.

As a manufacturer, Furniture Brands has to support the dealers who resell its furniture and market to the consumers who purchase from the dealers. The company used one process for producing high-resolution images to satisfy dealer advertising needs, and yet another for its website assets. For each website image, four different sizes were required, and most of them had to be cropped manually and still others had to be tweaked so they're zoom-able.

In addition, Furniture Brands sought to improve its customer experience by enabling instant visualization of custom furnishings and making its print catalogs more easily accessible.

• Streamline image production and management workflow
• Online catalog and visualization tools for customizing furniture bring higher levels of service to dealers and consumers
• Media Portal enables unprecedented, uniform process for managing and distributing assets to employees and dealers

Furniture Brands extended Adobe Scene7 for rich media management and hosting across most of its brands after successfully deploying the platform on Thomasville.com to dynamically render upholstery on its customizable furniture.

For Furniture Brands, Scene7's ability to create variations using a single master source image has made all the difference, giving it unprecedented flexibility to create any number of image derivatives. Now, zoom-able photos no longer require incremental manipulation.

"We load the master images just once to run our zoom, high resolution and all the different sized images for our websites," said Eric Tessau, director of eCommerce, Furniture Brands. "Furniture is detail-oriented with intricate carvings and inlays so having Scene7 provide the zoom capabilities off a master image is critical, particularly with higher-end brands that offer more intricate details."

The Scene7 workflow has brought a streamlined, unified process to managing and distributing the company's creative assets. The Scene7 Publishing System is the single repository with Scene7 Media Portal providing both employees and dealers self-serve access to the product photos they need. "Media Portal means only one upload. Until Scene7, we had two different processes to serve our b2b and b2c needs," Eric Tessau said.

Using the Scene7 eCatalog solution, Furniture Brands brought its print catalogs online and made them interactive and easily accessible. Typically, consumers have had to pay for them or get them from dealers; now, they can view everything online in a familiar browsing format and link through to the product page for more information if they see an item they like.

By bringing a host of tools online, from the customization and visualization tools to virtual catalogs, Furniture Brands is bringing greater convenience to its customers.

"In our industry, a lot of the technologies for doing the upholstery draping is offered in the store and is not available online, so having it available where someone can do it from the comfort of their home and generate different wild and crazy sofas at 11 o'clock at night when the store is closed lets us offer a new level of service," added Tessau.

Using Scene7, Furniture Brands dramatically reduced the number of photo-management hours to 35, down from 180 per month, an 81% efficiency gain.

Return rates on custom furniture sold by Thomasville are lower, thanks to the Scene7 visualization and rendering tool. "The draping tool proves what the customer is going to get without us having to make the furniture, and it has improved sales because instead of dreaming about it, people know what they're going to get, " according to Eric Tessau.

With so many brands and images to manage, having a single source image from which derivatives can be created has also minimized versioning errors.

"Scene7 has given us great flexibility and enabled us to meet tight launch schedules. Any time a new idea comes up, we're able to execute on it quickly by virtue of having the image and render server tools. There are many times when we need new sized photos for a special promotion or a social media tie-in. With Scene7, we're able to react and deliver, because there's no additional time commitment needed," Eric Tessau noted.

To Clients Overview