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Industry: Furnishings & Decor Solution: Dynamic Imaging, eVideo  Challenges:
Niche Modern designs, manufactures and markets high-end, hand-blown interior glass lighting. Its wholesale business, which includes sales to decorators and architects designing for hospitality venues like restaurants, hotels, and bars, comprise 90% of the company's revenue. Niche Modern's direct-to-consumer business accounts for the rest. Maintaining a high-end brand that echoes beauty and modernity is critical for the five-year old start-up. As it competes directly against large, established lighting manufacturers, while distributing its products through interior design heavyweights like Design Within Reach, Niche Modern needed to build a credible brand positioning that conveys the modernist aesthetic. Its website plays a key role here: Apart from comprising 10% of Niche Modern's sales, it is also the means through which the vast majority of its customers are introduced to the company. This means the site, particularly the product images, have to create a great first impression. Additionally, Niche Modern wanted to create industry buzz-- but without committing big dollars. Yet, for a business with a small staff, Niche Modern was investing too much time in creating product images. It was storing every product image in Photoshop files, aiming to capture every color and shape variation for its entire lighting line, making for a highly manually-intensive process. To enable the view of different sized images, scripts had to be written to execute a set of complex export actions; moreover, Niche Modern was utilizing a homegrown rudimentary zoom function that was buggy and difficult to maintain and scale across its product lines. Best Practices:
Since implementing Scene7, Niche Modern has streamlined its image production, producing significant efficiency gains. Since Niche Modern does not outsource its website maintenance, Scene 7's user-friendly image creation and publishing workflow makes it easy to train new staff or temp workers on the platform. Scene7 has also boosted Niche Modern's up-market branding, thanks to its crisp and high-resolution images. With lots of viewing options like zoom and pan, complemented by alternate views showing how specific lighting products are applied in various settings, from open kitchens to cozy bars, Niche Modern brings its branding story full-circle. With limited marketing resources, Niche Modern has come to rely on social media and word-of-mouth to generate publicity and awareness. Gaining coverage in the trade press and blogs is a top marketing objective–whenever Niche Modern receives mention in the press or interior design blogs, its web traffic spikes. Niche Modern integrated Scene7's embed-code feature on its product pages, making it easy for bloggers to publish an entire image set, complete with Scene7's rich viewing tools. Bloggers who grab the embed codes can display the full image sets showing Niche Modern's lighting products in their many hues and shapes and offer their readers dynamic zoom capabilities through the Scene7 multimedia viewer. View the post at the Better Living Through Design blog to see one result. Niche Modern expects many more bloggers and writers to use this feature when it rolls out embedded mixed media viewers to include video for every product and category page in the second-half of 2010. The simplified photo upload and publish process has also allowed Niche Modern to facilitate more sharing, since it can now easily post pictures of its designer clients' completed projects using the company's lighting. As its gallery showcases many real-life, imaginative examples of how its fixtures can light up a room, nichemodern.com is well-positioned to become a source of inspiration and community for decorators. "Time and money are the most precious resources for us," said Jeremy Pyles, co-owner of Niche Modern. "I don't have a lot of time to deal with brand development and product imagery. But Scene7 gives us the ability to portray ourselves as an established brand and allows us to compete with companies that are much bigger. In that sense, it levels the playing field. I have access to the same tools that the big players have; Scene7 is an incredible tool-set that small businesses can afford, and it has elevated my brand. It's a confidence and trust-builder when customers see the sophisticated and smooth imagery, and better imagery has helped sell more of our visually sophisticated products." Results: Since implementing Scene7 rich media capabilities, Niche Modern total sales have accelerated 23% year-over-year; online sales have grown 228%. Niche Modern's improved and enriched site, powered by Scene7, has engaged site visitors further; they are spending 9% more time on the site, averaging 7 page-views, versus earlier 5.5 page-views. |
“Scene7 is an incredible tool-set that small businesses can afford, and it has elevated my brand. It's a confidence and trust-builder when customers see the sophisticated and smooth imagery, and better imagery has helped sell more of our visually sophisticated products.” |
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