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 Industry: Furnishings & Decor Solution: Dynamic Imaging, eCatalogs  Challenges:
As a multi-channel retailer, Restoration Hardware makes its products available through retail stores, print catalogs and online. One of the company’s challenges is to continuously improve its customers’ multi-channel shopping experience. Specifically, the web team in the Direct to Customer Division, noticed more sites offering their printed catalogs as a new way to browse for products online. With limited resources and time to add this new feature, the team sought alternative ways to implement their “Shop by Catalog” area. In addition, Restoration Hardware photographs all of its upholstery items such as sofas, sectionals, chairs, and ottomans specifically for its website. One of the company's challenges is to digitally represent all of its upholstery items with all of its fabric options. Many of these items are available in up to 16 different fabric options. The time and costs to photograph each furniture piece with every fabric option was too significant to undertake. Thus, Restoration Hardware needed to evaluate other ways to help its customers better visualize these alternatives. Best Practices:
Selecting Scene7’s fully hosted eCatalog service solution, Restoration Hardware outsourced the entire print catalog web publishing and hosting to Scene7’s Client Services division. Restoration Hardware simply delivers its printed catalog pages in PDF format to Scene7. Scene7 does the rest of the work (except for final approvals) including uploading the PDF files into its hosted Dynamic Imaging on Demand network, ordering each catalog page properly, linking areas within each catalog page to a Restoration Hardware product page, and publishing to Scene7’s hosted network for customer viewing. Typically, in less than a week’s time, Scene7 can publish Restoration Hardware’s entire printed catalog online and make it available to view at Restoration Hardware’s website. Restoration Hardware customers can view these catalogs, using Scene7 hosted eCatalog viewer provides unique viewing capabilities including: dynamic panning and zooming, sticky notes with individual annotation, rollover product descriptions and tool tip help. Eventually, the customer may consider taking their catalog publishing in-house as Scene7 has a variety of licensing options from outsourced “On Demand” to packaged software. Restoration Hardware is utilizing Scene7’s Image Authoring client in-house to computer generate all of its upholstery furniture color and fabric option photography. Displayed in a pop-up window on its site, customers can access and view all fabric options on any upholstery item by simply clicking on the “colorizer” button and choosing a fabric option. The furniture piece instantly changes to display the chosen fabric on the frame. Using this approach, Restoration Hardware has avoided nearly all costs and time associated with custom samples, studio photography, and production costs required to actually photograph every fabric option on each furniture piece. Scene7’s proprietary “authoring” process works with Restoration Hardware’s existing imagery, this one-time process generates each digital upholstery option from a single master image — simply modifying key elements such as colors, textures and patterns — just as if new original photography had been completed. Exact photo-realism is achieved, photos retain critical effects such as reflections, lighting, and shadowing even with complex patterns, piping, trims, finishes and folds. Results: Scene7’s eCatalog and Image Authoring client have helped Restoration Hardware experience significant conversion rate growth. Customers browsing via the eCatalog viewer have a higher conversion rate by 2x. The results have far exceeded Restoration Hardware’s expectations for both internal workflow optimization and customer conversion improvements. In the future, the web team plans to further extend its use of Scene7’s platform by adding detail rich zoom and sophisticated image templating capabilities to further enhance its product presentation — ultimately supporting its goal for continuously improving its customer shopping experience. “Scene7’s one-of-kind visualization capabilities and customer service have exceeded our expectations. Using Scene7’s eCatalog service offering has offloaded a tremendous amount of internal work — freeing up the web team to work on other initiatives. Scene7’s catalog viewer has set us apart from other companies’ online catalog viewing with its proprietary dynamic panning, zooming, and ‘sticky notes’. Utilizing Scene7’s fabric rendering in our “Colorizer” area, allows Restoration Hardware to offer superior photo-realism to view all upholstery fabric options while avoiding 6-figure photography costs. More importantly, Scene7’s dynamic imaging capabilities have contributed to our recent conversion rate growth. We are eager to implement more of Scene7’s rich merchandising tools,” said Stephanie Garcia, VP of e-commerce, Restoration Hardware, Inc.
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