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Industry: Furnishings & Decor Solution: Visual Configurators  Challenges:
Room & Board is a national retailer, creating affordable, well-designed, long-lasting furniture for more than 25 years. Always striving to achieve a balance between functional and beautiful, Room & Board's furniture is built to adapt to shoppers' changing needs. The company's passion is in creating beautiful designs that can stand the test of time–whether a customer is furnishing an entire home or adding a few key pieces to transform a room–and is borne from a desire to help shoppers create a space that is uniquely their own. Best Practices: In order for customers to purchase custom merchandise online, it is critical that they see a visual of the furniture that they have uniquely designed. Room & Board hired interactive agency HYDRANT to design and develop a dynamic consumer-facing configuration tool that would allow customers to design and purchase a customized Linear cabinet with ease and confidence. HYDRANT built a sophisticated Flash application designed to make the most of Adobe Scene7's unique dynamic rendering capabilities that allow for the many size, material and design components to be realistically applied onto any Linear cabinet. The configurator serves as a virtual Design Associate, guiding customers along a logical decision-making path, and assisting them with completing a custom cabinet design. This tool is not only beneficial for online shoppers that may never otherwise phone or email Design Associates during the online cabinet creation, it is also an invaluable tool for the Design Associates to use while assisting customers in stores. Visualization is necessary for purchase; therefore the configurator translates into sales. HYDRANT developed the Linear custom cabinet configurator to enable Room & Board customers to assemble and design a custom cabinet to their specifications for height, width, depth, wood material, steel material and with over forty different cabinet insert options. These combinations translate into thousands of individual images that are dynamically served, sized, and composited, based on customer choices using Adobe Scene7's unique visual rendering. Once the design is complete, the customer is given even greater confidence in their design choices by being able to zoom into the cabinet to see details as well as print an image of the cabinet complete with specifications. "Having all the product imagery served by Scene7 was a critical component of our design for the configurator," said Alder Yarrow, Founder and Principal of HYDRANT. "The complex rules of what components go together and all the options of wood finishes and hardware meant that we needed to be able to swap out any visual element on the fly – from a door, to a wine rack, to a handle, to the wood finish of the entire cabinet – which we knew would be as simple as making a different call to Scene7." Scene7 solutions enabled HYDRANT and Room & Board to create a configurator that breaks through complexity to deliver a very beautiful and realistic visual of the customer’s own creation. It's as simple as choosing your cabinet type – classic or modular – then choosing your preferred dimensions, your wood, base, hardware and inserts and you’re done! "We were impressed with the solutions that the Scene7 platform enabled for other clients, and we knew that combining HYDRANT's design expertise with Scene7's technical capabilities would bring our custom cabinet configurator to the next level, “said Jill Magaard, Web Customer Experience Architect for Room & Board. The Adobe Scene7 cross media publishing platform has also helped Room & Board to properly prepare, update, and display images within the configurator so that a very sophisticated program appears to be fairly simple, even transparent, for the customer. From a workload standpoint, Scene7 provides Room & Board with the ability to update, publish and serve its Linear cabinet images without having to touch the application code; proving incredibly efficient in terms of time and cost. "The Adobe Scene7 platform and tools have given us much more control over our own assets. We are able to make changes to our images without delay and when unusual challenges have arisen, the team has been very responsive in helping us find solutions," added Magaard. Results: Room & Board believes that customer satisfaction is represented by the increase in sales for this product, particularly for online shoppers, who are now more confidently purchasing a custom linear cabinet. Revenue impact: Online Revenue increased by 152% In-store revenue increased by 6% Direct/Catalog revenue decreased by 26% Enterprise sales revenue increased by 28% Projected annual ROI = 950% across all channels "Scene7 has been a critical part of our ability to produce and maintain our tens of thousands of images on the website to better sell our product. We have gained many efficiencies in our abilities to display our product images in different sizes for different types of pages, as well as the ability to provide an image of every product in every option or variation on our site. The Scene7 team has been an excellent partner for Room & Board. We have had extremely positive experiences working with everyone from initial training to image production to custom development services," said Lisa Knapp, Project Manager for Room & Board. |
