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Industry: Furnishings & Decor, Home Improvement Solution: Asset Management, Dynamic Imaging, eCatalogs, Visual Configurator  Challenges:
Maine Cottage furniture, a unique "coastal living" made-to-order furniture purveyor recognized a shift in the way that people were buying furniture and was eager to get ahead of the curve by offering its full lineup of products online. By choosing to use the web as the "threshold" for engaging customers (as opposed to physical store locations), Maine Cottage decided to invest in creating a web presence rich enough in quality and content that consumers could get the complete spectrum of information required to make a purchase decision. With Adobe Scene7 and the use of cross media, Maine Cottage has been able to revolutionize the way in which it features the presentation of products, leveraging techniques like dynamic resizing, image rendering, zoom, and eCatalog to bring every product in every category, in 40 colors and 200 fabrics, to life like never before. Best Practices: Scene7 has enabled Maine Cottage to aesthetically and comprehensively present its products in an online capacity. Without a nationwide brick and mortar presence it became crucial to the longevity of the business for Maine Cottage to provide customers with an opportunity to see the entire line of products, customized by color and fabric, from the comfort of their home. "We take orders nationwide from an audience who often never sees our products in person before making the purchase. This can amount to rooms-full of furniture and a total dollar value of $20,000 or $30,000 in a single transaction. It's crucial that we get customers as close to a showroom experience as we possibly can to both ensure satisfaction and minimize returns," David Petersen, Chief Marketing Officer at Maine Cottage. Scene7's Dynamic Image Rendering has helped Maine Cottage to visualize all texture, material, color, pattern and surface options, generated from a single master image and swatches. Users can see all of their options prior to purchase, and gain greater confidence during decision making. Scene7 eliminates the need to generate, store, manage, and reference multiple sized versions of the same image. In fact, this automatic generation of "virtual images" on-the-fly, in any size, crop, or resolution has dramatically reduced the photography and production costs. Maine Cottage manages the entire production process internally — from creating product vignettes to producing vibrant eCatalogs. "The team was quickly up to speed and controlling the process and implementation sitewide. We were able to make editing and aesthetic decisions quickly and we’ve learned how to maximize Scene7 — a testament to the accessibility of the Scene7 software usability, logic, training and support resources," Cordie Southall, Marketing Director at Maine Cottage. Maine Cottage has leveraged Scene7's technology to assist in front end product development as well. When product designers are first working on new fabric ideas they are able to draw, scan, and import the preliminary sketches as textures into Scene7. This has saved time and rounds of review internally, eliminating some of the cumbersome sub-steps involved in bringing a product or new idea to market. And interestingly, Maine Cottage has also been revolutionary in its approach to bringing the versatility of the internet to the showroom. With customer kiosks in place, both shoppers and sales associates alike can quickly and easily configure and render a room (complete with fabric and color of choice) and generate a printable PDF with real time pricing based on customized choices. The customer is then able to clearly understand all of their options and can identify in real time what changes, if any, need to be made. Historically features like "zoom" and "image rendering and swatching" were unavailable on Maine Cottage's consumer-facing website, so it's fairly easy to attribute Scene7 to the uptick in site stickiness and conversion. Both the site refresh and Scene7 rollout were critical components in shifting away from what was a wholesale business to what has become a profitable retail business; the website instrumental in achieving this transformation. "Anyone who hasn't made the choice to connect with customers through a rich website is going to lose business to those who are. Affluent consumers aren't going to wander around from store to store to find furnishings – they want ease and convenience and a rich online shopping experience," David Petersen. "Customers think that Maine Cottage is a much bigger business than we actually are. That speaks volumes to the richness of the site and breadth of imagery we can provide. This is the first year that Maine Cottage will attribute 90% of sales to direct-to-consumer, when 70% of the business recently resided with specialty retailers." Results: Maine Cottage selected the Adobe Scene7 solution to quickly and seamlessly achieve a realistic and compelling shopping experience for its customers. Orchestrating a simultaneous site refresh with the deployment of Scene7 quickly met business objectives for a 15-25% sales increase – despite tumultuous times. “The Scene7 training was invaluable. It made all the difference in getting us trained, up and running — along with your excellent Technical Support team. Your team made an enthusiastic effort to stay in touch well beyond our 2 days of on-site training and had the same goal of imaging perfection that we do. It has benefited Maine Cottage that the Image Authoring software was originally created for a furniture company! It’s a fabulous, versatile tool," Cordie Southall. "We are very pleased with Scene7 and would highly recommend your image rendering and hosting for a multitude of different business needs." "The furniture business has not been easy in the past year. To a large degree, Scene7 is helping us to survive the worst economic storm in our company's 20 year history. We are making it through with the benefit of Scene7," David Petersen. Scene7 Visual Configurators' ability to quickly display a spectrum of unique colors and fabrics has spiked customer interest in obtaining color chips and fabric swatches, an incredibly important step in the sales process as this serves as both a launch pad for conversation with the customer as well as the final step in the decision-making process. Leveraging the Scene7 hosted platform, Maine Cottage utilizes the tool to earn media coverage of products and the company by creating print or web-ready product images for press requests and other publications who may want to feature a particular color/fabric. In fact, Maine Cottage media coverage is more regular as a result of this additional capacity. Now firmly positioned as the "go-to" resource for colorful home furnishings products, Maine Cottage is ready to serve any editorial, consumer, or internal whim — because they can. |
