Aaron Conant 0:18

Happy Wednesday, everybody. My name is Aaron Conant. I'm the co-founder, Managing Director of BWG Connect. We're a networking and knowledge-sharing group with 1000s of brands who do exactly that we network and now share together to stay on top, the newest trends, strategies, pain points, whatever it might be that shaping the digital landscape as a whole will host close to 240 of these educational events for the network. This year, we'll probably do close to 25 in-person small format dinners. So if you're in a tier-one city, just ping us, shoot me a note or Matt a note or somebody here and we'll kind of put you on the list. You know, these are, these are great to do virtually. But hey, if we can get you know, 15 to 20 brands around the dinner, those are always super fun as well get the network together as a whole. So just shoot us a note more than happy to put you on the list. The The other thing is here, just a couple of housekeeping items as we get started. Number one, we're starting three to four minutes after the hour. And just so you know, we're gonna wrap up with at least three to four minutes to go in the hour as well, to give you plenty of time to get on to your next meeting without being late. The other thing is we want these to be as educational and informational as possible. So at any point in time you have any questions, don't hesitate to drop them in the chat, drop them into the q&a. Or you can always email them to me Aaron Aaron@bwgconnect.com. And on that side, I mean, that's even an hour after the call tomorrow, next week, you ever have any questions or you need any connections in the digital space, don't ever hesitate to shoot us an email with close to 10,000 brands in the network, we usually can get you an answer in under 24 hours. So never hesitate to use us for that or for partner selection or anything like that. We just got a great network that we can leverage to help you know us as a collective whole, you know, up our digital game. So as I kind of kick off this, this conversation, I'm speaking with 30 Plus brands a week. And in those conversations, you know, just asking, Hey, what are you looking at? What's changing the landscape for you? What are you most interested in? What are the things that you know, you need to learn more about or or would like to understand more about and when the same topics come up over and over again. We host an event like this, we got some great friends, great partners, supporters of the network over at Threekit they have been for a while now helping a lot of brands out in it. And you know, they're kind of leaders in this 3D visual content space. So I would think back a year and a half ago, rarely comes up. In the past six to nine months has been coming up left and right. I don't know if anybody saw yesterday, released on Facebook Mark Zuckerberg dropping $10 billion into a metaverse. And it's 3D visual, AI, AR VR, whatever it might be like this is coming. So kind of a nice time. I'm not surprised it's come up enough. But anyways, if we want to do a brief intro, I want to dive into some of the stuff that's happening in the content space. Again, you have any questions across the board on anything related to this drop into the chat or the q&a. But you know, Marc, I'll kind of kick it over to you, if you want to do a brief intro on yourself and the company, that'd be awesome. And then we can do well as well. And then we can kind of kick off the conversation. So I'm good.

Marc Uible 3:29

Yeah, sounds good. And Aaron, thank you. Love partnering with you guys, and getting out of conversations, which are open and honest. And I love how you always challenge us to provide, you know real value in what we're actually seeing in the market. So that's what we endeavor to do today. Hi, everyone, my name is Marc. I'm the Vice President of Marketing and alliances at Threekit. We're visual commerce platforms, what that means, do we enable brands to show every single potential variation of their product, do it in 3D augmented reality, virtual photography gives brands, this sort of superpower to that, hey, say every single variation of your product, which is amazing, but also to do things like prototype. So create visuals of products that you've never even created before to use do 3D ads to service and do commerce of your product. And so when you have a configurable, an interactive element of your product that you can use, for marketing for sales for service for eCommerce, it's really, really special for brands. And so that's, that's what we're here to talk about how brands are using this 3D and augmented reality inverse photography experience across sort of the customer lifecycle and the business lifecycle. I see a lot of exciting things excited to talk about it. Will, do you wanna introduce yourselfas well?

Will Thompson 4:49

Yeah, absolutely. Hi, everybody. My name is Will Thompson. I'm on the solution engineering team here at Threekit. I feel like I'm pretty much as a tech evangelist for the platform, getting it into the hands of our partners. and future customers and just kind of having some more strategic and technical conversations around the platform and how it works. So really excited to have a discussion today.

Aaron Conant 5:08

Yeah. Awesome. So a couple questions are top of mind for me. And then you know, Marc, I know you had some data you wanted to go through. So if you want to throw that up, more, you know, the the presentation that that'll be fine, because I know, there'll be some talking points in there. How quickly is this being adopted? You know, from and can you break that into? So this is what brands are asking me? Is it right? Is it the right time? time, effort, money? It is got 5000 projects in their queue? Right? How do I leverage this? You know, there's the thing, and maybe it's the pay, there's digitally native, it's good for pay, there's Fortune 100, we see them using it Fortune 500. And then there's, you know, you know, mid-tier who's leveraging this today from what you guys are seeing, and who's seen the most benefits? That's kind of like a key thing.

Marc Uible 5:59

Yeah, I think. And this is such a no, because we have really changed our business over the last six months to address this challenge, which is we are seeing uncertain industries, not even about size, certain industries are much further along the scale, or I guess you'd call it like the the adoption curve. Those industries are like furniture, building building materials, those those companies that are there very often they're familiar with 3D, they're familiar with CAD AutoCAD, they're really familiar with how to take that sort of this rough sketch, or this rough design file, and how they also face the issue of, hey, my product is super configurable. There are millions or trillions or infinite number of ways that I can make this product, different materials, add ons, structure, parametric configuration, which is how big or small thing can be. So we're finding that those folks are pretty far along. And they are aware of what 3D and augmented reality, what that means and how to use those files. So those folks, I would still call them, like mid adopters, a lot of those folks are aware of 3D files, what you can do with them. And then you've got a lot of other consumer brands, I know we've got a number of eyewear brands, shoe brands, and those people are early adopters in those. So I would say if you're a furniture brand, or a, let's say, in the building or building materials, or I know we've got maybe some folks from fans on here. That says a somewhat those folks understand and are starting to move into a pretty aggressively whereas we've got folks like Milwaukee Tools, or various brands with LVMH, the kind of Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy, luxury brands, now they're starting to step their foot in because they can see that this is where, let's say the ball or the puck is moving. And they're able to say like, yeah, I really want to provide an engaging, interactive experience. Whereas if you're in furniture right now, and you're not really pursuing this, and you're kind of like, Hey, I have some 3D files, but you know, we're just still doing photography, I think that's a miss. And I think what we're seeing a lot there is like, there's so much you can do, because they have those files and not to work the generally, they plug in super easily into a platform like Threekit. I mean, we're seeing 60 70% of our, you know, of our volume right now really heavy industry, because I think they're seeing the burning platform that you have the files, you have the assets. And you really got to do this because you have a configurable product. And if you want to sell it, do you want to do eCommerce with it, you want to do mark marketing with it, you really have to use a platform for it as opposed to just like using it occasionally.

Aaron Conant 8:50

So quick question comes in. And just a reminder, you can drop into the chat the q&a or email them to me Aaron Aaron@bwgconnect.com. Do you see this falling on the retailer? Or do you see this folly more on on the brand and the brand and manufacturer who's who's leveraging this?

Marc Uible 9:07

This is this is very much for the brand and manufacturer. So retailers the issue that you're gonna run into I know I saw someone from from Walmart join the issue you're gonna have there as you don't own the file. So you don't you don't have the 3D asset, you don't have the CAD file. And so your issue is and you don't necessarily know what fabrics or materials or add ons can go on top of this thing. And so the value of something like Threekit are really using 3D assets at all is you need to take your product catalog and all of those, you know, original form assets, the Ross it's like CAD files or 3D assets. And what 3D does is sort of smashes those together to create visuals at a massive scale. If you're a retailer, you don't really have your manufacturer’s full catalog. You don't really usually have the 3D files or the manufacturing files. And so usually, like 98% of time we're working the brand and manufacturer, except in those rare cases where the retailer has all of that, like, let's say if they are the sole distributor of a manufacturing, and they have a very, very tight partnership, that manufacturer brand, that can work. But usually the retailer runs into that problem of, hey, I don't have the files, and I don't have the full product catalog. It's gonna be difficult to work with with with this.

Aaron Conant 10:24

So that a brand needs to take ownership of it. I mean, it makes sense, right, you're going to be providing the assets just across across the board today. Any other asset you're providing, you're gonna provide it to a retailer the same way, right? That's just kind of right in

Marc Uible 10:42

one thing, and we'll feel free to speak up. Like one thing we're seeing though, is like, we work in Milwaukee Tools. And they do like some some PPE material and things of that, of that nature. And what they're doing is they're working with Ace Hardware with Home Depot, and they say, Hey, we have these amazing visual experiences in 3D and AR, can I plug them into our PDP pages on your site, Home Depot, on your site, Ace, etc. And actually, what they're getting at is, is saying, Yeah, I want to provide a better experience I want, I want people laying on my side and have an amazing 3D AR experience. Go on, plug it in. And so we're powering that type of experience where now, you know, the lights, we also work with, like RYOBI, or Milwaukee Tools, I'm just hitting this industry in particular, there say, Yeah, I'd love that, you know, I want to sell more and the retailer's, like I want a better experience. And so it works for both. And that's one way the likes of like Walmart or Home Depot, or ACE can get in the game is by asking their brands, hey, do you want to do this experience?

Aaron Conant 11:47

So another question that comes in a? So are you seeing it used more in retailer or on direct consumer sites, it's more direct to consumer,

Marc Uible 11:55

and B2B is huge for us. Like, I think that it's a little bit, it's not as common to do retail, because the retailer needs to sort of make an exception or you know, sort of say, Hey, I'm going to let you do that, you know, insert this, it's just as will correct them wrong, just like a snippet of code to put on a page to show the viewer and the 3D AR experience the configuration experience. But like, it still takes a little bit a collaboration to get that done. So it's much more about the brand, the B2B experience, on their site, in their sales channel, etc.

Aaron Conant 12:31

So you plug into that. So on your side, you say snippet of code is dropped in on, you know, Magento, Bigcommerce, Shopify or Salesforce Commerce, Cloud, whatever, whatever it is. Experience, what about custom, you know, they have their own, you know, homegrown platform, those are getting fewer and farther between, but the some of the big boys out there still have them.

Will Thompson 12:53

Yep, it's not a problem Threekit’s totally headless. So really, for the 3D experience, it is just a couple lines of code to get it in its simplest form. If you're a customer that's using virtual photography, again, it's the same thing you can use our player for that to distribute the images, or once they're created, they're just images and you can kind of use those however you want marketing, emails, eCommerce, custom sites, Twitter, Facebook, whatever you want. Yeah,

Marc Uible 13:17

I'd say 20, like, almost 20% of our customers are on custom custom builds. So we're familiar with that. We know that, like some of the really, some of our biggest customers build custom.

Aaron Conant 13:28

How many of you will have 3D, you know, AR VR, you know, built in, do you think by the end of next year, because I feel like we're at this space where like, we're at the forefront, but it's not, I'm not jumping to every website. I see. And seeing it there. Right. There's some there's some big ones like the crate and barrels and stuff like that. But, you know, is this reaching the point where everybody's going to have it or, you know, 85% You know, there's gonna be some crayons or something, right? Like,

I don't know if you need it for that. But

Marc Uible 13:59

it's crazy. I was a I'm a huge brand proponent of aura ring. Is this cool rain that gives you health data on how you're doing. Last night, I got an app, you know, update that said, Hey, we have a new ring coming out. And it's just like, beautiful ring. And I was pinching it and squeezing it and trying to rotate it and thinking you guys are idiots like you have this beautiful new product. And it's customizable and I it's just an image and like the whole page is focused on this product, and you're not able to rotate zoom in. You know, it has like seven different materials that you can put on it. Um, I think we're still going to be I think five years from now is a much more interesting time. And the reason I'm saying that is huge Tim Cook onstage at the latest Apple conference saying augmented reality will pervade your life over the next five years. Apple you know,

Apple is going All in, you know, their biggest launches on their new devices is the Lidar scanner, which is effectively showing AR more effectively. Like Apple, the biggest, the biggest power most powerful player really in the world in terms of how people will experience things digitally is saying, We're all in on ar, ar is powered solely by 3D visuals. Right? So that's just that's just augmented reality. You've got Shopify, you know, kind of probably the most powerful second player in eCommerce powering saying anyone can upload 3D models. You've got Google doing 3D ads, I mean, the list goes on and on. But like the very, very powerful players in the market, the market makers of commerce and digital devices are going all in on 3D AR. So I think next year, it's going to be insanely different. I think we're looking at this curve where it's starting to steep up. And I think five years from now, ever, like a huge portion of people will be like saying, I'm not taking photos of my product, I'm using a platform like Threekit to create because I can create hundreds, 1000s millions or billions of visuals, they're much more interactive, I can get data on what people are adjusting. And by the way Google wants that data to and Apple wants that data to they want to be able to say like, this is a much richer object. And so that's a year from now, I think like we're still at that curve, where it's starting to tip up. Five years from now, I think the world looks completely different. And a huge portion of leading brands are using 3D and augmented reality.

Will Thompson 16:33

Yeah. Funny you say that? Because when Apple went up with the iPhone and said, We don't support Flash, everybody was like what you mean, you don't support flash flash is like the biggest media, like platform on the web. They were responsible for the web, adopting new technologies, like Flash has nowhere anymore, it's because Apple went up with the iPhone and said, we're not supporting anymore. So that's kind of who we're dealing with right now. It's really exciting to kind of see it happen before.

Marc Uible 16:57

It really takes off.

Aaron Conant 16:58

Yeah, I mean, how they're dictated. I mean, there's a couple things that pop up. One is just around content creation demands, I want to I want to dive into that second, just because it's something that I hear a 30 plus brands, you know, 20 plus of them are talking about the content needs, and you're just hitting on something that you're, you're not going to see people doing stage photoshoots as much as anymore, and you can't, it's hard to replace UGC, which is huge right now. But you still need content for ads. But a question comes in, do you have any stats on how many customers have some type of augmented reality app already on their phone? You know, is there an issue having to download and install another phone app? So how do you see these being rendered across the board? Right? Have you know, lifespan is what? Three days, right? You put it out and you try it out, and then it gets lost in your phone.

Marc Uible 17:47

If your name is not IKEA, or Warby Parker, I think it is. Or, you know,

Walmart, or you know, any any any top five brand, I think it is very foolish to ask consumers to try to download an app, especially for augmented reality. When web AR is developing so quickly. It's it's very like Apple and Google have and Facebook for that matter are investing massive amounts into where they are, you really should be thinking about where they are, do not be asking customers to download an app for what's already powerful on the web right now. And by the way, they're improving that. So the people who build an app for AR, what's what's silly about that is that you're not getting the latest Apple and Google the Apple and Google updates on their web AR experience. And so when Apple says, Hey, you can do try on AR, you don't have to do any coding to try on AR You can use our API, you can use our code base for it. All of a sudden, that person who has that app who spent 30,000, or 50,000 $100,000 on an app is saying, oh, we can't do that experience. And trial and error is just one of hundreds of features that they have literally hundreds of developers working on you want access to where they are. I really would strongly advise creating a app experience for AR there's plenty of brands that have done it. But it's a Yeah, so you see

Aaron Conant 19:19

all the players in this space. I mean, Threekit included, you're plugging into a mobile is a mobile site or you know, desktop and providing AR built into it.

Will Thompson 19:30

Right? Yeah. So the way Threekit operates, like Marc said, just to kind of connect a few dots for people that are less familiar with Threekit doesn't need any apps or installations to use the 3D viewer or the augmented reality experiences. We do use Apple and Androids native features. So if you land on your mobile phone and you want to see an AR, you hit the button and it launches. You don't have to download the app. And then you don't download the free kid app. You don't download the crane barrel app and then return to their site. It's all built on the browser because like Marc said, Apple and Google are innovating much faster than we would be able to with our own implementation team. So we use the tech They build, and they're making a huge push for it. So it's, it's, you know, it's like having our own personal in house development team working on it. And

Marc Uible 20:09

I want to just share my screen here, if anyone has two screens, yeah, there we go. Let's see if anyone has a quick second, open up your mobile phone and your camera and scan this QR code in the bottom left hand corner. And that's what we're talking about, like, this is the type of experience that you should have, where it's just, it's fast, it's mobile, it's yours these images, like click into,

Aaron Conant 20:30

like presentation mode, like,

Marc Uible 20:32

I'm sorry, yeah. And let's see, it's loading. There you go. So I would I'll take out your phone and kind of get this experience. And so I think the I believe the first is a KitchenAid mixer, click into that. And then you'll see in 3D and then you can say View in my space, you can see an AR, this is really the type of experience you should be thinking about. And, you know, for some of the folks that are a little bit more in the furniture industry, a really strong a really strong experience, there is an experience whereby someone can configure it in, let's say, virtual photography. And then save the configuration, send it to a friend or a boss, or someone who might be your buyer, and say, hey, check out this configuration. I think you're really like it. I'm sorry. Yeah, this is the shop and 3D experience you can let's see, what would be a good experience to click,

Will Thompson 21:26

I'm gonna put the link in the chat here in the Zoom chat. Okay, cool.

Marc Uible 21:32

Yeah, I'd say open, Imma see that chat would that that'd be good. Um, what you want us to be able to send your buyers or your shoppers to hey, I'm gonna visually configure this in 3D on the desktop, perhaps or on my phone. And then say view on my Spanish once I have that, that that configuration that I particularly like, now that person saying Great, now I can share that to all my friends and buyers

Aaron Conant 21:58

shoppers. So you see this,

like you mentioned B2B making its way into you know, trade show format, right? Digital catalogs? I mean, we're at this unique spot where the buyers now, right, you know, isn't our millennials, right? The oldest one, he was like, 3839. Now? Yeah, right, you're buying rolls. They said, Hey, our favorite. You know, our actual favorite place to buy is Amazon, its, you know, completely digital. Now, Amazon's going to, you know, 3D 360 Spin images. You know it then they have a massive push into B2B which this comes in handy. Like, and you just mentioned that. So I'm just kind of connecting some dots here, like, do you see this making its way, not only into the direct to consumer side, but the the B2B side as well.

Yeah, I think the B2B side is

Marc Uible 22:57

super, super exciting, because I think the thing, honestly, that we're seeing, as a company is

folks, folks come to us and they're like, hey, I want to configurator you know, and I want to be able to show my product, and I want to be able to show every variation. But there are so many second, third, fourth, fifth order things that happen after that, which are saying, you know, I want to make I want to, you know, we

can make custom glasses, let's say or, let me say better, like, we can make custom chairs, like, okay, that that's wonderful. You have a lot of different materials and add ons, and people like to customize and you can charge a premium, people are willing to pay, by the way, a survey from Deloitte showed people are willing to pay 25% More for customized or personalized products. So great, you have that ability. Now someone has a configured product, what happens when, so that creates an order. But then it creates all of the post order workflow of building Materials, assembly instructions,

service, you know, set like all of these things that really need to happen, I might throw it over to will it maybe we'll can show an example. Like, what there.

I think everyone on this phone call might think, Oh, I just need to like show some of the experience online. But actually, there's a lot more to it. There's like that's where we fit in a lot really, really well in the B2B world, because there's a lot of other requirements happen after the order. And I think what folks have seen other folks do is like, Oh, I'll work with an agency, you know, and they'll just build me a configure it online. And then it's like, the order gets submitted and someone's like looking at a visual. And it's like, what am I supposed to do with this? Now you're spending, you're spending a full head counter to someone translating that order that they see into everything that happens after the order. And that's a really difficult thing to do. And so that's where we're seeing a lot in the B2B world in particular. I got an

Aaron Conant 24:55

example here queued up if that's okay.

Yeah, I have some people asking about stats to go along with it as well. So we can walk through that. Let's walk through that. Well, really quick, and then we can kind of go into some some of the stats that I know, have come out a you'd mentioned some, you know, already mark, you know, I mean, pure I know, impacted conversion, you know, is it worth it? You know, at the end of the day, you know, everybody's got, you know, 150 things on the tech stack platform that they're evaluating. They got to make a data driven decision on, you know, what's meaningful and what's not.

Marc Uible 25:27

Yeah, after what shows this, I'll pop some things up on the screen.

Will Thompson 25:31

Awesome. Yeah, and this is, this is just really relevant to kind of points that Marc was making in that there's a lot happening behind the scenes. And after you configure an item, especially when it comes to B2B. So this is one of our customers, Sapphire balconies, they make, they're not part of the original construction of the building. They're, they're built after the fact and then attached to the building. So these buildings can already exist, and balconies get added on afterwards. So this is not a superficial configurator. There's a lot of data in this configurator that says, you know, what's the maximum amount of width that's happening here? What kind of angers do I need on the building, and things like that. So I'm hard. I'm hardly a construction expert. So sorry, my phrasing is all odd there. But

when you get to something that's immensely configurable, like something like this, I think the previous experience was like a series of a couple 100, like checkboxes you would make to kind of see what you wanted, they would go to the Sapphire team, they would create a render and send it back in a week or so or however long it took them. So with this, you can not only kind of get immediate information on what you're configuring. But you can also see the different kind of data points that happen during configuration. So right now I'm in construction view, and I just made some changes to kind of show you what the different balconies can look like. But you'll notice that there are these, these anchor points on the actual building. So if I start to change how far the balcony projects and how wide the balcony is, and you'll see that the anchors are moving, and additional anchors are being placed, the doors have doubled. Now, because we've gotten to a certain length, there's a lot of data being passed around. That's not only for the user to say, here's what it looks like, you know, this is for architects and builders, so all the information that they're choosing here, you know, it has to go to production, it has to be ordered, there's materials, there's transportation, there's logistics, and all this other stuff that has to happen. So as a user, when I have my configurator done, I get this awesome rundown of all the bill of materials, the options that I've chosen. But three can also produce a PDF proposal. So sapphire has this configuration with the information that was inputted by the user, you can say, Here's a 25 page document that's going to be sent to the architects, and if they approve it, you know, it's gonna be sent to manufacturing and ordering and all that good stuff. So I think I may have zoomed in just a little bit here. I'm not going to go through all 25 pages of this document. But I just kind of want to point out that the information on what the balcony looks like, you know, rigidity, concerns, connection summary, all that is taken from Threekit and digested one way or another and then put into this document. So like Marc said, the configuration is done, I as a person that is built designing these balcony know what it's going to look like. And now it's being sent to the next step, which is ordering logistics, all that good stuff. And this is a very robust example. We also do it with, you know, Cuca hats, they design hats for collegiate teams and things like that. And once that configuration is done, that kind of manufacturing process also gets kicked down the line. So

Aaron Conant 28:48

no, I think it crushed it on the kind of the question on the B2B side. I mean, yeah, the answer's yes. And it's highly applicable.

Marc Uible 28:55

Now. Let me flash up some some things we're seeing in the market. Well, that was I was awesomely present right here. And everyone had I know we're talking a lot of consumer we're supposed to be more than consumer goods. I'd like everyone, even on the b2c side, you need to be thinking about a it's not just about the configuration experience, it's about like, on your side, you're gonna have a lot of trouble or this one we we found this pain about a year and a half ago is like if we just give you a configurator. Your business doesn't operate that well. So let's talk about the front end real quick. We did a survey of 5000 eCommerce shoppers. We did this about nine months ago. 60% of them said, I want more 3D and AR experiences when I'm shopping for eCommerce goods. 42% said they would pay more if they could see their product in 3D AR is that sad? I misspoke. It's not 25% it's 20%. So 20% are willing to pay more they're willing to pay 20% More for customized goods. Shopify saw a 200% increase in conversion rate with augmented reality. And then there's this five Final note, which is like, hey, look, where is everybody on this call? And this is not a, you know, this is kind of beating a dead horse 57% of shoppers say they shop at a brand based on the customer experience?

Well, like, it's so obvious, we always forget it, right? Like, the reason you take an Uber is because of the customer experience. Yes, I'll send you a copy of the presentation, Michael, thanks for that, um, like, the reason you use Uber is the customer experience. It's simple, it's easy. The reason people buy from you as a brand, is because it's simple. And it's easy, and it looks good. And this is for those brands on this call, who are, you know, maybe not in the furniture or building or building material space. This is a outstanding bit of novelty and brand differentiation that you get. And for those folks that are in the furniture industry, or home goods or that nature of the world, a lot of folks are starting to move into this world and starting to offer a more robust shopping and buying experience. And so it's a little bit hotter there. It was, I think burning platform kind of thing.

Aaron Conant 31:13

Yeah, I mean, content now, it's kind of overtaken ratings and reviews, right, as a primary decision factor. I think a lot of that was fueled by, you know, a lot of stuff going on with Amazon and ratings and reviews, and you know, the potential for fake reviews? Are they real? Are they not? Did they really purchase it or not? Were they driven or incentivized, you know, that people they trust more? You know, the visual side? You know, so, you know, a question comes in around, you know, what is the lift? Right, kind of, you know, consolidated together. So, it looks awesome. Is this a six month lift to get installed? Is this, you know, anything in the 3D space here? What is the typical time frame? If people want to have it, you know, up and rolling? Other questions that come up? Like, is it, you know, universal across the website? Is there a test and learn? You know, how do you see, you know, regardless of platform here, what's the best in class way to roll this out? And what's the timeframe for,

right, so there's two ways to roll this out. One way is,

Marc Uible 32:21

is like, hey, I want to take a product that's configurable, I want to take it kind of dip my toe in, that takes about three months, to get that thing fully run fully up and running, we, you know, it's gonna run you like let's say, so we work a tailor tailor made, right? If sent to driver, it's one of the premium products, I want to roll it out. The it's customizable, and a dozen different spots.

You know, they're like, we want to test this out, you know, see what the world's like, three months later, that is amazing experience. I'll send everyone the case study for this, but they hit their sales, their their quarterly sales target in a month. Incredible, incredible experience, they actually had that they had to shut it down, because they had too many orders. And so this is just that type of trends, or their views on it are outstanding. People are like, Oh my God, I've always wanted to be able to do this, I always wanted to customize it, it's novel, and it's cool. So for the folks on here that are thinking, oh, I want to have a big holiday season, or, you know, holiday season, you know, we're just coming in, that'd be really tight right now. But like, Hey, I've got a big event coming up in three months, four months, whatever it might be, this is a very novel way to drive attention and attraction and brand, you know, sort of loyalty to a product that about three months, tailor branded, tailor made experience, you know, we'll send some gifts and images of that, or some some, you know, views of that and experience that ran about like about 50k. You know, so it's like, dip my toe when other folks are thinking much more robustly, particularly in the furniture, building building materials. So for consumer goods, that's a great

way to think about it. If you're thinking like, Hey, I, I'm in this group that people already operating, I want that sapphire like experience where like, I need digital transformation, I need to think about how our whole business operates. I'm taking aspirin, 100 grand on photos right now. And we can create these incredible visual experiences in 2d and well, maybe we should show the brain neural trends like in 2d and 3D and augmented reality, I want to be able to send this all across my business users all across my visit had, you know, tied into our ERP to our eCommerce, etc. That's where we're talking much longer, you know, five, six months, nine months, you know, that's a digital transformation project. And those are the ones where that's a really big deal. You know, that's, that's how you move from. That's how you really move the needle and say, like, Hey, I hit my sales target for one product to say like this is I hit our sales target for our entire company. And a month instead of three months, and that's the kind of thing we're really excited about these days.

Aaron Conant 35:04

So a quick question comes in, it'd be cool to see the grain barrel thing that you mentioned. But are you able to use this simply as content as a content generation tool and not use the AR 3D portion on the website? So I think this gets back to like, a trend that I have right now that I'm hearing is the cost of content is through the roof, the amount that people need the rate at which it's being consumed. You know, it's just through the roof, and another photoshoot, you know, you know, another, you know, doc for, you know, guidelines, and, you know, what you shoot, and you know, what's in the background? You know, it's all through the roof. Right? So do you see people using it is just, you know, content generation tool, and I will say, you can just capture a single image, right, and use it that way.

Yeah, it's, I'll be bold and say, if you're

Marc Uible 35:57

just like, if you just want like, hey, I want some send, send some content of our product out to the social or whatever, this is not three, Threekit. And I don't think 3D is a really a great platform for you. Now, if you're creating barrel, we rendered 3 million and we'll we'll go through this 3 million images for them in less than a month, and you're you can scroll down and like there's literally millions of pixel perfect, incredible images. Now, that's for pennies per image, finished images that you can change that a drop of a hat. So, like, that's,

it's extremely cheap. If you want to do it at scale, it's not a good solution. If you're like, Hey, I just want a cheap way to get 150 photos. You know, like that's, that's not what this is.

Aaron Conant 36:47

So this is all digitally rendered, that does not alter actually rendered.

Marc Uible 36:51

And a lot of these you can there's, there's I think 252 Different Yeah, 252 fabric options. You can choose any one I think on every single one of these, there's like six different sizing options. So it's extremely inexpensive to do it at scale. But like yeah, if you're like, Hey, I just want

you know, hundreds or whatever,

that there isn't a great solution right now if you're like I just want 200 good cheap images. Yeah, doesn't doesn't work like that. I'm not aware of another solution out there that you could get that done with a quality way.

Will Thompson 37:31

This is also a great example like Marc mentioned earlier if kind of like you know, a be testing some products and really going out and kind of experimenting a little bit because even Crate and Barrel. You know, before three caterers a solution, like Threekit, they had to photograph manually. So they had to manufacture they had to ship the product, they had to get into photography studio, take the images. But now like even the most, you know, out there designs that maybe nobody has even bought yet before, and they certainly haven't manufactured can even be visualized now. So when the customer comes to the site, and they do have that eclectic taste, and they're like, I want this, you know, came in Azura, or something even wilder like that, they can go in and see what it looks like and get that idea. And they're confident what they what they purchase. But you can just see that there's, you know, an insane amount of fabric swatches here that you could choose from, or another unkillable tool.

Marc Uible 38:21

Another super powerful thing with Threekit’s is like, you can add in a new material tomorrow and say I want this material on these 475 couches, but not those 236 couches, you can set that rule and instantly press a button all of a sudden that visual is now possible. It that visual. And also, by the way, this is a 3D file. So this is why we call virtual photographer, I think they're a B testing. AR as well. So because it's a 3D file, you can see it in 2d Here, you can see an augmented reality. Well, maybe the I think it's the usually the top row that is where they're testing the AR. But that's the power of it. And oh, by the way, with Threekit, you can also do something whereby, yeah, this is the example. Yeah, so if you want to like you can figure your couch now you can scan a QR code and see it and it looks like a 2d image. But you can scan it now and see an hour but you added it, you added material and say I like this material that's added to all of our couches. It's done instantly 2D 3D ar you can you can do this by yourself by yourself in the platform by the way your team can do in the platform. I mean, you can also get insights. Hey, what materials are getting a lot of engagement right now. People seem to be scrolling to go into the zebra zebra print right now. Oh, maybe we should do more zebra prints. Those are the types of things that we're it's like we're talking about a business solution here. Not just like, hey, I wanted to see the zebra print on 75 couches, like that. That's great. You know what I mean? But like you can do so much more with it. Than just just that

Aaron Conant 39:58

what what happens? To website speed, though, that's a that's a concern, especially right now. Right? What

happens to website speed, Will you want to talk about the,

Marc Uible 40:09

I believe whether there's a particular type of particular words that to put in there,

Will Thompson 40:15

you know, for me, frankly, the, the impact on the page load is negligible, it's not gonna stop the page from loading, if you have the 3D experience, you're gonna see the little Threekit loading bar, and depending on the experience, it's going to take, you know, a couple milliseconds to a couple seconds to load if it's sapphire, or, you know, a furniture company. So it just kind of depends on hard, good, soft goods. But the page around it is not, is not going to stop loading, you know, like the old days, we had to wait for the page to load in the top down. And also Threekit is designed to be performance, you know, we have data centers all over the world to kind of make sure that the content gets delivered as quickly and efficiently as possible. But it's like YouTube, you know, if you have a large, long video, it's going to take a second to load. But if you have a quick asset, it's gonna load quickly. Our goal is to not be sitting in waiting for an experience, that's the fastest way to get somebody to click off the website, and we're in the business of bringing people to the website and keeping them there. So we're always striving for better performance, but from a usability standpoint, that you're not going to notice any kind of like slowing down or sluggishness

Marc Uible 41:16

on the website. Yeah, the the photographer loads very quickly, if you have a very, very configurable asset. Yeah, you know, I mean, like that maybe some of the culture Leggett and Platt, you have an extremely configurable products that you want people to dive into. Yeah, it might take a couple of seconds, because but I think that user is a little bit of a different user, right? It's like a B2B buyer. And like, we don't, no one wants it to take 10 seconds. That's not what I'm talking about. But the difference between like, few milliseconds and a few seconds, can be big. But if it's like a B2B Buying environment, or an object that like, someone is really making a considered purchase on there, okay, waiting two or three seconds, with the right messaging around it. But yes, that, you know, the bigger, the more complex, it's gonna take a little bit longer. But the bigger, more complex, the shopper is a little bit more willing to be like, Oh, I'm going to spend 2000 5000 $10,000 on this thing. $100,000 Yeah, I can wait two or three seconds for the original like for it to load and then it will be fast.

Aaron Conant 42:16

Awesome, love it actually have a hand up here. So we'll try to say a lot of talk. Veronica didn't know if you want to jump in, in ask a quick question. You can also drop it in the chat if it's easier, but

what's ever best for you? Sure, thanks, sir. Yeah. Can you hear me? Yeah, loud and clear. Very good. Um,

Veronica 42:41

my question is, you're talking about the raw file as in, you know, the kind of file that you need to create that kind of experience. That's we are outdoor patio furniture manufacturers, and we have sets that have nine different colors. And I went to your demo and not very good. Because what we what we normally do is that we just get the JPEG file from manufacturers and, you know, put it up like most of the manufacturers, so I like to know, the kind of file format to start with. So when we build new set, what will be the, the the file format? That's first question. Second question is that. So what we're doing here is the static change of color and configuration? So that won't be any animation or, you know, crazy. And that's not what I'm expecting, but I'm just asking as an extension of the question. So we are basically looking at for the for the customer to view the the color that they are looking for, because we are more towards B2B sell to the retailer, not so much. So submitting a proposal to architects like what we'll have showed before on the, you know, the really cool 3D plan.

So that's my that's my question. I

think that how to start, stop. That's what I

gearing up for. Thank you. Yeah,

Will Thompson 44:19

thank you for the question I can answer that comes up a lot. And there's two ways to approach it. And there are customers that have 3D files in one format or another to start the project, whether it's CAD or artistic art, artistic 3D, either of those are good starting points. CAD is typically a good starting point to see kind of dimensions the how the product is designed. And those sorts of things because they have a lot of internal components. That Threekit as a visualization tool doesn't need. Artistic art is a great starting point, because usually that just needs some minor rework to get optimized for the platform. And then there are the customers that have no 3D art. And that's not a stopping For an implementation by any means that we have a lot of customers that don't have 3D When they start. So getting that content generated is all it takes. Really, it's the same thing as hiring a graphic designer, or a contractor to build a website, there's a lot of resources we have in house and a large partner network of 3D modelers. So getting that content generated is just, you know, it's a standard hourly price by whoever you decide to go along with. In terms of file formats, 3D can ingest a variety of files, FBX, X OBJ, GLB, USD Z, and some cad types as well. So importing those is not a problem. If we can't ingest them natively, we can get them converted and put

into the platform.

I'm not sure if I understood the second question of, you know, how to change color. Are you asking? You know what, once the model is in Threekit, how do you create those new materials and new colors and things like that?

Veronica 45:58

Oh, no, actually, I

was looking at your demo that with KitchenAid, appliances, the blender get changed color, when you change to the different, you know, the the customer change it to, you know, want to have a green kind of a mixer, then they can see the actual green one. So which is, which is kind of the thing that as a furniture manufacturer will love to do. So you know, you change the furniture, and also change the color of the cushion. So, but that's not something that I kind of expect that our furniture be animated like that. That's just extension. But what I have this is that I like to ask you another question. If you if I may, is the

how,

when when we create a raw file, then maybe perhaps we can ask the supplier overseas to provide us one. Or perhaps this is something that people like to sell to servers provider that we ship the product to us to take the take the photo and and get it render into the proper format, is that what it is the reason why I said I've got bombarded with email from service provider, they want us to kind of participate in the in the 3D photos. I know this is the way to go. It just that I'm just one of those manufacturers, they all that can wait. You know, we we deal with it later. So that's why I'm kind of interested into today's webinar. I know Aaron always put on new, new and very useful information. That's why I say I better jump into it and learn something more. So that's my, yeah, my second question is about, yeah, do we need to have the studio photo taken?

Will Thompson 47:51

No,

you don't. If there are some other bits of information to go off of, you know, it's, um, if the manufacturer has CAD files that we can use, then that's a great starting point, we can kind of iterate the art from there. We do have customers that send us physical swatches of products, whether it's to, you know, get a material, right. And we do have clients that have send us full products as well, if that is the most efficient way, I'm not one of the people on the 3D team. So I don't want to speak for them. But product photography is a great way to start. You don't need 3D to start a project. And you know, if there's a lot of data on on the dimensions and the size of the product, that's extremely helpful as well. And we can get started from

Aaron Conant 48:29

that. Okay, thank you. Yeah, thank you. Awesome. So

another question that comes in here. Right? We don't have at our disposal to try to execute the entry of the files and manipulate Do you have others that can do this for us reasonably? We can provide the 2d or 3D files, can you take their physical product and work

from that? Yeah,

Will Thompson 48:53

we have clients that don't have in house 3D teams, we have a great services team that can, you know, take what you have, whether it's 3D or 2d files, and then, you know, scope out the project from creation to implementation, we have 3D teams that can generate that content, we can also connect you to one of our our partners out there that does a lot of our 3D content generation as well, you don't need a 3D team to be a Threekit customer. And then of course, the 3D is kind of the starting point for a project. But just in the space that we are, there's not, you know, we have clients that have just a couple employees, they definitely don't have in-house 3D teams. So not having that internal resources is not a stopping point for our

Marc Uible 49:32

projects at all. And one note there about the price or cost of that is like we don't make any margin. In fact, we usually lose a little bit money on that portion of the products like or that portion of the project. And so like, it's extremely important that you have a beautiful product that you take pride in that makes sense the business that pass all the data on etc. We have found the best experts in the world to help build that for you. But we're here to make money Honey on software, frankly. And so that's that you will get an extremely reasonable and usually the best price in the world for the best quality gear Threekit, because many other providers, if you work with an agency or Veronica, you mentioned that girl that contacts you like, they're making money off the service. So like, they're gonna charge a lot of money to say, hey, like, here it is, you're gonna say, well, it's okay. But can you make it better? Well, you're making that bet that some random service, you know, in the Ukraine or wherever, saying, This is what it is. And so that's something we are often picking up on projects and brands that started with one of those agencies, or were those groups.

And it just, you know, they're like, Hey, I don't see the configurator. And like, I don't like the look of it, or it's not fast enough, or doesn't have a hook into my systems. Oh, now we got, now we got a serious problem. And that's kind of often where we pick up on projects is people go with us, because that's, you're working with a group that's not really validated, it doesn't really, they kind of can take your money and run so to speak.

Aaron Conant 51:02

Yeah. Yep. Yep. Awesome.

Awesome. Well, I see we're almost right at time here. So we got about two minutes left. You know, I do want to say a quick thank you to Marc and Will for your time today. I mean, you guys are great friends, partners, supporters to the network for a while now. help it out tonnes of brands in it, which is awesome. And, and encourage anybody you have, you know, follow up questions a copy of the presentation more than happy to put you in touch with Marc and Will they're great people worth putting the half-hour on the calendar, kind of walk-in through doing a deep dive on, you know, some more of the stats around, you know why this is rapidly becoming one of the most I would say interesting topics and aggressive ways to enhance your, your direct consumer and your B2B site as well. And so worth you know, kind of putting time on their calendars and follow up with that. They have amazing product, lots of people love it become highly recommended. And that's how we get in contact with them is recommendations from you know, the brands and the network as a whole. You know, on that note, if you have other, you know, areas a Ventris, you need other connections never hesitate to reach out, always happy to give you kind of a short list of top service providers recommended from the network on any topic from direct consumer, or content or international expansion or drop shipping or Amazon. You know, in, you know, in this space, obviously, the team of Threekit, you know, kind of leads the pack here. And so, Mark, you want to kind of wrap this up with key takeaways in the last, you know, minute, minute and a half here. Yeah,

Marc Uible 52:28

I mean, I think key takeaways to me, and hopefully this resonates with you all is there are certain industries that this is that 3D and AR are here. And now, the furniture, the building materials, the buildings, anything that goes in a home or around a building or in the building those folks, it's a burning platform, and now is the time to be moving into this industry. For everyone else in the consumer goods world, this is a great time to stand out and be this novelty is driving incredible sales because it's still new and different in a way to differentiate your brand and stand out. And it's relatively easy to do at that small scale and take a really popular product and do it. It's the front end, of course, it's beautiful. It's interactive, it's 3D. And it's augmented reality. It's it's trendy, but really, really, really you aught to think about how it translates into everything that happens after the order, and the marketing and the getting rid of photo, you know, optimizing your photoshoots and the manufacturing the building of materials and service. You really got to think about it expansively. So that's what I'd say. Thank you, everyone for the time the questions. Really appreciate it.

Aaron Conant 53:38

Yeah, this was fun. This is awesome. And thanks, everybody who dialed in, and thanks for sending in all the questions. Thanks for being willing to jump in and makes these conversations fantastic. If you have those questions, there's probably most people on the on the line have those same questions as well. So thanks to the people that jumped in. We're going to go ahead and wrap it up here right on time. Hope everybody has a fantastic Wednesday, everybody, take care, stay safe, look forward to have you at a future event. Don't ever hesitate to reach out even if you just want to have a quick strategy session on digital and what's going on. I spend you know, a lot of my time every week doing that and more than happy to jump on the phone with anybody here. Give him a quick rundown. Hope everybody has a fantastic day. Thanks again, Marc. Thanks Will thank you, buddy. Take care, everybody.