The Digital Showroom is No Longer Optional

In a pre-pandemic world, only pioneering digitally advanced brands such as UnderArmour were deploying digital showroom platforms alongside virtual selling platforms, and digital asset management solutions. Wherever possible, such early adopters aspired to include 3D product “digital twins” to reduce sales sample costs while also improving marketplace efficiencies by providing internal teams (public relations, marketing, wholesale and B2C sales) and external partners (buyers, agencies, and press) with a visual centralized place to store and access product samples and related imagery. During the pandemic, most brands became “fast followers,” and for many it was the digital showroom that kept them in business during Covid-19 lockdown. It should therefore be no surprise that in a post pandemic world, the digital showroom is no longer optional. Reduced travel budgets, rising supply chain costs, and the desire to be more sustainable are forcing brands to adopt, at minimum, a hybrid showroom blend of physical and digital. With more than 3,000 brands and a half million buyers on their platform, NuOrder by Lightspeed supports thousands of virtual market appointments every year, processing nearly US$40 billion in orders globally. Theory, Rag & Bone, Coach, and Acne Studios are among their clients. According to NuOrder’s “State of B2B Commerce” report, 92% of brands now use business-to-business (B2B) software to capture orders. According to the report, while 2020 and 2021 saw an acceleration in the adoption of these technologies, brands face a new challenge in 2022: differentiation. Brands use digital B2B solutions as a way to improve the customer experience, offering assortments that are visually more appealing and curated to their customers. The platform visualizes the buy, allows users to compare it to their plan, and even to create merchandising stories. Features include 360-degree product views, and videos that can be tagged with shop-able product hotspots for easy online ordering. Digital storytelling is now an expected part of the marketplace experience.

“Customers want to see themselves in their environment—the beach, college—while dressing for an occasion,” says BigThinx CEO & CTO Shivang Desai. BigThinx is a Milan-based virtual try on and virtual showroom platform. “Most virtual showrooms create a pixel perfect custom showroom for a large brand,” he says. “We created the virtual showroom to enable people to identify the clothing on themselves in situ, and for the brands, something that they could host,” he explains. “We have developed hundreds of templates smaller brands can use and customize—think Shopify for the showroom. Just drag and drop to create a custom showroom. Then add virtual try-ons to the virtual showroom and the environment becomes an immersive and entertaining experience.” Hatch, based in Amsterdam, is a digital showroom platform that also expands the showroom to an experience beyond sales. Hatch’s clients include Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and Havaianas. “Working with HATCH has been an exciting and transformative experience for Havaianas,” explains marketing director Merel Werners. “We have been very impressed by the combination of technology and the human touch, and how Hatch puts the brand first in a digital way so that the digital showroom feels completely Havaianas.” How Hard Is This?

The longest lead time to a digital sample is a physical one, which is then photographed and post-produced (retouched, color corrected) for online use. And the longest lead time to a physical sample is the creation of the raw material. Has the creation of digital fabric simulations improved since pre-Covid days? Are more brands really embracing 3D “digital twins” as part of their ongoing product development processes? Yazan Malkosh, founder and CEO of Swatchbook, a US-based platform for material sourcing and management, exploration, design, and visualization thinks so. “Swatchbook is fundamentally changing the way brands collaborate with their supply chain,” he explains. Swatchbook was the first, and boasts being the world’s largest, digitized materials platform. Clients include Target and New Balance. Swatchbook works with raw material suppliers to onboard textile collections, and in addition to capturing the standard supplier and material data, the platform can include 3D visualizations, texture scans, renders, and videos. Collections can also be viewed and interacted with on mobile devices. This includes augmented reality (AR) simulations of products. “A big challenge with digital twin creation and use is the lack of true interoperability,” explains Matthew Mounesy-Wood, UK-based digital designer and former creative director for Gant. “While digital raw materials provide excellent realistic simulations, not all 3D programs read the same file formats,” he explains. “And each 3D application—Browzwear, Clo3D, Optitex—has slight nuances to avatar and finished good simulations. As a creative, I use a combination of technologies depending upon my desired final product.” “Since there is no agreed file format to support seamless integration from one software to the next, I sometimes encounter challenges,” he explains. “It’s a constant tug between managing client expectations and individual platform ability and interoperability. Creating smooth, focused workflows that reduce time and costs, while delivering well crafted, high-quality, fit-for-purpose, and flexible assets is, at the moment, challenging.” With the proliferation of so many digital assets, often just the storage of digital assets with relevant metadata and information can be overwhelming for brands. Spreadsheets are no longer enough.  Pimberly, a UK-based Digital Asset Management (DAM)/Product Information Management (PIM) Platform as a Service (PAAS) aims to solve this. Product imagery, videos, 360-degree views, and 3D assets are stored with relevant metadata, copy, and translation. “We capture the lifecycle of digital assets with relevant information for use in any platform, such as e-commerce or digital showrooms,” explains Sophie Gladstone-Sutcliffe, Pimberly pre-sales consultant. “Each channel can have multiple tones of voice and languages per channel per product. We keep this all in one place and feed relevant data and imagery to each channel when approved for use.” The platform’s artificial intelligence (AI) can automate product recommendations based on relational metadata. As an example, a scarf or umbrella can be recommended as a cross sell to a raincoat, she explains. “Having spearheaded the product creation sustainability roadmap in my previous corporate role, I appreciate that 3D sampling, and the end-to-end connected digitalization of the supply chain is a key enabler to reducing and removing waste in our industry,” Mounsey-Wood says. “But the future goes beyond the digital showroom. I believe the future will extend this digital experience direct to the consumer who will soon be co-creating with the brand,” he says.  

Craig Crawford is a two-time Tabbie award-winning author and founderprenuer of Crawford IT,  a London-based consulting firm specializing in the digital transformation of brands. Contact him on Twitter @getamobilelife; or his mobile number, +44 07834584785.