Why 3D is the New Asset Class & How to use it grow your eCom Business
Jun 1, 2022 12:00 AM - 12:00 AM EDT
Increasingly, consumers are seeking out custom and personalized experiences. But when countless unique options are offered, how can businesses manage the possibilities without overwhelming their time and budget?
By customizing and configuring products in an augmented 3D reality environment, customers can interact with them as part of the buyer experience. Providing customers with catered experiences is a powerful tool that can generate customer happiness, satisfaction, and loyalty.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson sits down with Marc Uible, Vice President of Marketing at Threekit, to discuss how web-based augmented reality is a powerful tool to enhance the consumer experience, increase growth, and generate customer loyalty. Marc explains the impact 3D augmented reality has on photography and marketing costs, the power of visualizing every version of your product, and providing consumers with context for the customization they’re seeking.
Threekit uses 3D and augmented reality to improve the eCommerce landscape and provide better customer experiences for shoppers and business buyers everywhere.
Connect with ThreekitVP of Marketing and Alliances at Threekit
Marc Uible is the VP of Marketing and Alliances at Threekit, a visual commerce company that helps brands increase sales by using 3D and augmented reality to customize and configure products so customers can interact with them as part of the buyer experience.
Marc is also a member of the board of advisors at LIFT and has worked at companies including Braintree, Avondale, and The Claro Group. Marc received his bachelor’s degree in international business, business economics, and public policy from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.
Senior Digital Strategist at BWG Connect
BWG Connect provides executive strategy & networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. BWG has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.
VP of Marketing and Alliances at Threekit
Marc Uible is the VP of Marketing and Alliances at Threekit, a visual commerce company that helps brands increase sales by using 3D and augmented reality to customize and configure products so customers can interact with them as part of the buyer experience.
Marc is also a member of the board of advisors at LIFT and has worked at companies including Braintree, Avondale, and The Claro Group. Marc received his bachelor’s degree in international business, business economics, and public policy from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.
Senior Digital Strategist at BWG Connect
BWG Connect provides executive strategy & networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution. BWG has built an exclusive network of 125,000+ senior professionals and hosts over 2,000 virtual and in-person networking events on an annual basis.
Senior Digital Strategist at BWG Connect
BWG Connect provides executive strategy & networking sessions that help brands from any industry with their overall business planning and execution.
Senior Digital Strategist Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson runs the group & connects with dozens of brand executives every week, always for free.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 0:18
Happy Wednesday everyone. I am Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson, Digital Strategist here at BWG Connect. And we are a network and knowledge sharing group, it's what we do, we stay on top of the latest trends, challenges, whatever it is, that is changing in the digital landscape. We are on track to do at least 500 of these webinars this year due to the increase in demand to better understand everything digital, and we will be doing at least 100 in person small format dinners. So if you happen to be in a tier one city, feel free to shoot us an email and we'd be happy to send you an invite, the dinners are typically 15 to 20 people having a specific discussion around a digital topic. It's always a great time, so we'd be happy to have you. Here at BWG Connect, we spend the majority of our time talking to brands to stay on top of the latest trends and challenges within the market. So I'd love to have a conversation with you, you can feel free to drop me a line at Tiffany, T-I-F-F-A-N-Y, at BWG Connect.com. And we can put some time on the calendar. It's from those conversations, we generate the content for future events. And it's also where we gain our resident experts such as Threekit, Marc, who's here, today's welcome, Marc. So if you're ever in need of any recommendations for any service providers within the digital space, do not hesitate to reach out we have a short list of the best of the best, and we'd be happy to provide that information to you. And we also know that a lot of people are hiring right now. So do note that we have a talent agency BWG Talent that we'd be happy to put you in contact with as well. A few housekeeping items. Like I said earlier, this is a 30 minute session. So we will be moving fast, we will wrap up at the 30 minute mark. If we happen to have some lingering Q&A, feel free to stay on. And we'll definitely get through those questions if they are there. But do note that we will be wrapping up around 30 minutes. And we want this to be educational and conversational. So if you have any question comments, do not hesitate to put them into the chat bar. Or if you feel more comfortable, you can email me directly at Tiffany, T-I-F-F-A-N-Y at BWG Connect.com. And we'll be sure to get to them. So with that, let's roll and talk about why 3D is a new asset class and how you use it in your eComm business. The team at Threekit have been awesome friends, partners in the network. So Marc, I'm gonna shoot it over to you if you give an introduction on yourself, and then we can do a deep dive into the presentation. That'd be awesome,
Marc Uible 2:40
Man, thank you, Tiffany. Hey, everyone, I'm stoked to be here. My name is Marc Uible. I'm the Vice President of Marketing at Threekit. Threekit is a visual commerce platform. Now you might be sitting there thinking "What is that?" We have an important perspective here. And I really want to frame this idea around like 3D is the new asset class for growing your business. I think a lot of folks on here might be thinking, Oh, 3D is just a kind of a cool little spinny thing that I put on my website. I'm here, I'm gonna show you a lot of demos, I'm gonna hit this thing pretty hard and quick. But it's to show you that if you have a customizable or configurable product, you need to show every version of your product. And there's a lot of front end things you need to solve to do that, and a lot of back end things you need to solve. But that is an amazing lever for growth. And I really want to hit that hard today, I want to show you the problems that businesses like you might have that have a complex product and want to show it and want to sell it and how we go about and how others go about solving that pain, and really delivering incredible results. So I'm going to jump in lots of demos, jump in the chat if you have any questions. Let's get started. So I think we're going to start here. I'll actually hold on, I'm gonna refresh my screen real quick. Oh, here we go. Perfect. Alright.
So we'll hit the top three challenges. We'll talk about customer success stories that peek inside the platform and and where to take it to get started. Yeah, I'm gonna move pretty fast. So let's jump in. All right, so challenges. So I want to hit on this because if you're on this call and you have a complex product, you have these challenges. So right over here, number one, if you have a complex products, if you can't show every variant, then you're probably not able to sell every variant. So you're missing out on revenue right there. Or perhaps you have a product that needs a sales team to sell it. And they need to generate renders or they need to, you know, still have this time this week or two weeks in between sales calls, while someone's figuring out hey, does this configuration actually work? You might have a SKU proliferation challenge, which is like hey, I have potentially hundreds of 1000s user millions of skews when your eCommerce platform isn't able to handle that that's a problem. Perhaps you're paying for photography right now. Look, the markets showing that the average finish photography cost is $50 to $100 per finished photo. At Threekit, we have a product called vulture photographer, it's about two pennies per finished image. Looks just as good, Crate & Barrel uses this, generating more than 3 million images in a weekend using Threekit. Or perhaps you have configuration challenge, which is, hey, every quarter, I have a new material that I want to add to my product, maybe you're making furniture, and hey, I've got new materials that I'm bringing in materials that I want to sunset, perhaps you're making jewelry, and you're saying, hey, I want to try this new material, this new design, I want to bring this in and replace that material with this material. And that becomes really hard to do at scale and other things like pricing becomes really hard. If you have a configurable or complex product, these are things that really should be resonating with you and thinking, Oh, dang, there's a huge world of opportunity here. And I want to sell more. And these are all little roadblocks that you might be running into.
So let's get into this first one. This is a product configuration challenge. Hey, I have configurable products. How do I show this product in real time over here on the right Lovesac, a customer of ours, their stock price has more than doubled since they started using Threekit almost all visuals on their entire experience or retire website are from Threekit, verse photography. And what you see here is 3D configuration. I'm also jumping in right after this into a demo. Look, what you need to manage all of these configuration all of these items is you you kind of need a platform that has rules and logic, such as, hey, here are my variable materials that I will assign to certain products. So for example, here you have the lounge chair. And in in your product catalog, the lounge share has assigned certain colors and certain wood colors. And you need to be able to map those two things onto each other. And that's exactly what Threekit does. And if you say add three more materials that are a part of your summer line, you just basically hit a button, upload those those materials into this product catalog and they instantly render. I'll go ahead and show you a real quick example of this live.
Tiffany, can you see my screen?
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 7:34
Yes.
Marc Uible 7:36
Great. So example here, here's this beautiful lounge chair beautiful, you know, you lose a little latency in screen sharing. But hopefully y'all can see this beautiful leather. And then you're able to just real quickly transfer it and start to see, okay, beautiful, you know, sort of a plaid here, you got 1000s of colors. And again, you're starting to see this example of, hey, this is a different type of experience that I'm interested in. You know, here's a wood color variant. As you can see, it's changed in there that the leg colors. And you can see even here, if you're this business, and you think oh, I'd like a photo, you have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 different woods, and you have about, let's call it 15 colors, so six times 20. That would be you would need 120 photos just to get one photo of every variant. And then let's say you want eight photos, which is kind of the minimum you want per product, all of a sudden you need 960 photos just to capture the possible variants of this chair. And it's going to be next time when you want to, hey, we're out of that material because the supply chain issues. Now all of a sudden, you're going back into your systems and it's a nightmare. With Threekit. It's simply uploading, you know, those, uploading them assigning those materials, and and then you're able to edit in real time. Oh, by the way, for anyone sitting there at home, this is a call to action. As a marketer, I'm proud to call a call to action, go ahead and get out your phone, point your phone at this QR code, scan it, and now you can see this exact configuration in your space. So just kind of uh, you know, we're talking about that kind of experience where it's not just the configuration rules challenges, but it's a better customer experience. So I'll go ahead and close this one out. And we'll go back into the presentation.
Alright, challenge two, the SKU dilemma. Now this gets more into the systems that you are working on, but I just want to call this out as an important roadblock that you might be running into if you have a configurable or complex product. If you are on Shopify or if you are on Commerce Cloud or if you are Magento, all of those systems have SKU limits. Which is to say, maybe it's 5000. Maybe it's 10,000. But you could see just on that past lounge chair, one lounge chair had 960 potential. Oh, I'm sorry, I believe it was, was it 160, it was less than that. It was like 100 220 skews. But most of you, if you run a mature business, you might have dozens or hundreds of potential items, with 1000s of potential variants, all of a sudden, that becomes way unmanageable for even just uploading into your eCommerce system. So endless skews equals endless problems, even if you could upload it, now you need to manage it. And so the way Threekit does it, we do this called dynamic skews, where you would recognize, for example, this product that you see down here on the right, this end table, it would recognize this product is only one SKU, and you're able to manage all of these variants inside of the platform, and then send that back into your eCommerce store. So it looks like one managed SKU, even though pricing can be dynamic on this SKU. So want to call that out, is a really keen example here. If you know, you know sort of thing, where a SKUs start to be a really big challenge on the back end, and that's something that we, you know, we help you solve, and that's something you'll have to be aware of that 3D gives you this ability. So it's not just a photo, with a few line items represented a SKU, it's this, you know, 3D and a platform giving you the ability to do that.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 11:32
Are you seeing like product development teams, this tool is their new best friend? Because I think my past life working in furniture, and lighting, and if we want to test a product, it was like, Oh, we have to hit the MOQ. And we have to do all that. And we don't even know if it's going to work.
Marc Uible 11:46
You know, Tiffany, that it's so funny, you mentioned that I'm, you know, the Vice President of Marketing here, and we started you know, I've been here for three years. And in my first time I was a, this is a great product for marketers. But we learned over the last year or so that actually, we often are selling and really working closely with the product team, like you just said, because those are the folks who know that know, this pain, the configuration pain, the SKU pain, the managing a variant pain really, really, really well. And they understand that if and for all my eCommerce marketing folks still love you. But you got to recognize the pain of hey, like, it's not just a spinning 3D thing on the front end, you got to manage all of the things after someone clicks, the bill of materials, you need to manage the SKU production, you need to manage all of these sort of automations for postorder workflows. And to make your business a better business. That's why I'm saying 3D is the new asset class. It's not just hey, this is a cool spending thing that you can put on your website, which it is.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 13:00
Yeah, that gels. Very cool.
Marc Uible 13:04
We do have a question, which I think is a great one is obviously the focus furniture, we could see where this can be utilized in clothing. But what about consumer goods like food and beverage or health care services? Yeah, we have some fantastic examples. I'll try to pull some of those up. You know, a great example. Let's call them food and beverage. We work with Ciroc right now. And so in this food and beverage world, when we we work a CPG companies that are saying right now, listen, I I don't want to compete, I've channeled conflicts with my retailers. And so I need to offer a sort of a more premium experience on my product. And so they how they go direct consumers, they offer a personalized version and, this is how Ciroc does it, offer a personalized version where I can design my own Ciroc bottle, put my name on it, say Happy Birthday to You know, Shawn, and all of a sudden that Ciroc that was gonna go for $35, retail, all sudden is going for $60. And it's coming right from Ciroc. And you're building a relationship as a consumer with the brand, right? So that's a really, really important differentiated experience where the brands are saying, hey, maybe I'll just go to slack.com because they're offering this really cool experience. That's sort of one example. I can jump into a healthcare example in a little bit as well. Feel free to ask another question there. Yeah, I'll try to show an example here too, when I get a minute.
Great. Alright, meeting software expect to meet and shopper expectations. This is the part that I think let's let's just be really clear here. We live in a world where customers expect more and more and more and more and if you're sitting are saying, Hey, it's okay for my customer to say, hey, send me a swatch. Or it's okay for me to say, hey, this is the photo, please imagine if it had this material on it. That's not what consumers are looking for either on the B2B side, or on the B2C side they're looking for, hey, I want to see you, I'm gonna have confidence and I want to buy now. And if you're not showing it to me, I'm not going to submit a form so you can send me a swatch, I'm not going to guess what's gonna look like I'm gonna go someone else who can. We are seeing incredible results in this, I'll go ahead and show you some Crate & Barrel stuff. And I'll jump in right into some examples now, but you want to create an experience where and I'll just go right now to Crate & Barrel. You want to create experience where someone really starts to understand, oh, like what someone can sit here and scroll forever. So this is Crate & Barrel, a customer of ours. Every single photo you see here is from Threekit. You could scroll and scroll, and scroll for ages. And that's what people like to do. They want to explore everything that you have to sell and really get involved with it. Let's click into this example. Here's a lounge deep sofa 93 inch, well, you might be want the regular the 41 inch, you can change that in real time, you can change it in from a two seat sofa, let's do the 105 inch bench coach cushions sofa. Now you could say hey, listen, there's 217 fabric options here. Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that you know, you know tons and tons and tons of people are buying I don't know, let's just scroll and scroll and scroll to the the Thrive shadow texture. But when someone wants to thrive Chateau texture, you better be able to show it because that person is looking to buy a couch. That's $2,971. So really give that a consideration. And with Threekit you can visualize all of these things in real time. So that's a that's kind of an important. And of course, yeah, you can do the free swatch. But notice, for most furniture makers, that free swatch is way up here. A lot of the free swatch, but no one really wants to do that. You don't have to do any imagining. This is us, obviously for eCommerce. But for the in store associates. You know, it's used for trade shows, it's used for a lot of things. It's also used for prototyping, which Crate & Barrel will say hey, listen, we got a new material. We haven't even made this couch yet. But let's see what people think about it. You know, let's see if people think about this material or this silver configuration. If people start buying, we can make it I'll jump over to a little bit more of a kind of a building materials. Use Case. This is where we start getting into, you know, a little bit heavier. But look, you got a door here, you can see the dimensions really clearly a little bit more of a b2b use case here. You know, I'm kind of going through configuring the handle finish, you can see here it's turned into nickel, the door finish, let's take let's turn it to. So obviously you can really engage with it here. You can turn to black, you know, maybe we'll do it white.
You can go to the handle. And again, this is called parametric configuration to handle extend, let's do a five inch and a handle height, let's put it to, I don't know, 10 inches, might want a really small door for little people. You know the frame you can see here as measured out the frame thickness, the door and glass, literally and I mean this sincerely. There are infinite configurations here the glass thickness just on the glass thickness, right. And then, of course you're able to view on your space. Again, you can QR code that. And this is just talking about a B2B experience, right? Let's click out of that.
And here we go. So you're here again, and then you're able to download the CAD file. Right. So this is super important. Now, this CAD file represents the ability to send it right to your manufacturer. This is basically all of the things that they need to get this thing built appropriately. Think of the power that this has now for your business. Now let's download CAD, you know, if you're working with architects, they might want that, but often that's sent from so Threekit can send, though that materials right to the manufacturing facility. So it's not again, I want to be really clear here. spinny thing on the website. That's cool. And that's engaging. That's important. You can spend zoom in, zoom out, do pretty configurations. You can see an AR that's great. And, and this is the same thing crane barrel is doing. You're exporting Billa materials, you're exporting assembly instructions, you're exporting CAD. So now as a business, you're jumping right into production as opposed to someone which is happening for a lot of these companies out here right now is they are translating what someone bought someone a human is translating this cat door on the back end saying, Okay, well, here's the pic list, here's, here's the things we need to actually get this thing made. And some of our customers that we're spending 345 10 headcount, just translating what's happening on the front end to the back end, so we can actually get made and delivered.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 20:28
Hopefully, it's correct.
Marc Uible 20:30
Excuse me?
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 20:30
We have the chance of, obviously, human error. This is like the gift that keeps on giving for all different departments.
Marc Uible
Correct. Yeah. That's 100%. True. And let's see, do we have any other questions? Are there any other demos that folks would like to see? I'd be happy to pull up a few.
Yeah, definitely feel free to share in the chat. Wanted to mention that, yeah, there's somebody who is using the configurator tool to personalize their products, which we all know from market research, like personalization just continues to grow. Consumers want that, they're expecting that.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson
I'm also curious too, on the returns rate, I can only assume that this is making a very big positive impact on less returns, because there's more power to the consumer understanding what they're buying.
Marc Uible 21:26
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, if you think about a customer, like Crate & Barrel, I mean, this totally transformed their business, the cost of returning a, you know, a sofa is immense. But don't even think about it that way. I mean, like, that's obviously like, it's a game changer, when someone's like, Oh, this is the material that I thought it was, this is everything I wish it was. But think about the customer experience, like no one wants to return your products, no one wants to go even if it's so here's an example here. This is actually wearing one of these Ajay press shirt, you know, you can zoom in, it's beautiful. And again, we're coming into this part where there's dozens and dozens and dozens of fabrics, and I want the nav lavender end on end. And I want the spread collar. I want the cuff, a French cuff. And I want the pocket. I want the flat pocket.
And again, what you're saying here, and certainly we come back to the returns thing is if you make just a little mistake, and the customer doesn't return is what I'd call shadow returns. All of a sudden, they're like, I don't really like this brand. You know what I mean? It wasn't what I thought I'm not gonna return it. And that's almost worse than a return, right? Because that customer is not coming back. They're there all of a sudden, they're unhappy. And so again, great opportunity to hear you're configuring this product in real time you know exactly what you're getting, you're happier for and you said, I'm gonna come back because I was really great experience.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 22:55
How about jewelry, or watches? You have any success stories about those lines?
Marc Uible 23:00
Absolutely. Let me just happen to just hop into a demo. So we've got a number of happy customers there. I'll just show a really quick demo here of a because I liked this one. Example here, just a real simple but really beautiful Rolex. And again, you're able to let's say, configure the strap, configure the configuration, you know, configure right here. See this beautiful detail here on the back. You can customize personalize it there on the back, you can see that I'm just moving my box a little bit here. So BWG you can see there hopefully.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 24:08
So kind of this this year. Watch it.
Marc Uible 24:12
But you can see the beautiful shine and shimmer that comes off that watch. We have a number of jewelry clients. I'm actually kind of not able to speak about them. A lot of them are in the how do I say they're from large European conglomerates that are not keen to have their name shared. So that was just a short little demo. We do have a number of jewelry clients.I mean, I think one that I can speak of is look class rings. Also great use case where you've got super configuration there. Usually a lot of personalization, people want to put their dates, their names or initials, and you want to be able to deliver that experience. It's really slickly and really quickly, or someone you know, but also within bounds. You can say, hey, listen, here's the outline of what the class ring should look like. And you're able to put, let's say, a little bit of personalization, or maybe choose a gemstone or two, but you want to kind of, hey, this is what the model should look like. So everyone can recognize the classroom because it is an example as well.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 25:19
That's engagement, wedding, and anniversary rings as well?
Marc Uible 25:23
Absolutely. In a great use case there. One of our customers, our jewelry customers does ring stalking, right, so they sell the engagement ring. And they also do ring stalking virtually. So you can see, hey, this is what the wedding ring would look like next to the engagement ring that you bought. These two would go well together, why don't you check these out? Oh, why don't you check out that one too. That's a marvelous way. If someone buys, someone buys engagement ring, God willing, they're also buying a wedding ring. And that's a huge sort of missed opportunity in the jewelry world. That should be that should be 95% of people that buy a wedding ring from you should also buy an engagement ring doesn't happen like that. And again, this is why it's not just hey, it's a spinning thing on my website, it's changing your business to address opportunities like that. So I know, I know we're coming up on time. Again, I'm a vice president of marketing at Threekit we are, I really, really think that if you have a complex or configurable product, there's really big challenges in showing and selling that thing. You got SKU problems, you got, hey, if I have a visual, if I don't have a visual, I can't sell my product. That's a huge challenge. Or if I'm trying to do these workarounds to make someone confident about a product, but I don't have a visual and I can't show it in real time. I can't price in real time. That's a really big problem. And when you do visualize it when you do price it when do show and gravitas, amazing progress. It delivers amazing results. Yeah, we work with brands like LVMH Lusitano, and Hennessy, TaylorMade, Crate & Barrel, Lovesac. Steelcase, Herman Miller, you know, dozens, dozens of brand, we've just got this amazing case study, which I'll try to send the group after tailor made saw a 50% increase in revenue for one of their custom drivers when they went with Threekit. Really amazing stuff. And again, so I guess I'm saying, you got a lot of challenges, but you can't show you can't sell lots of happy customers. And then also don't forget about this idea of post order workflows and 3D drives a lot of that where you can export CAD rights, your manufacturing facilities send a bill of materials to assemble that thing. assembly instructions,
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 27:39
Does it play nice with Amazon?
Marc Uible 27:43
You know, it can. So we have a distribution engine where you can send these assets in this material anywhere you want, whether that's eCommerce sales, Portal, Amazon, the Metaverse, we export NFT's. That's a really important part as well. I know we only got a minute but yeah, we understand great questions. I love this. Everybody. You want to use this materials in a lot of spaces? Not just like, hey, just on eCommerce, right? You want to do your Omni channel thing? Wow, lots of questions coming through.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 28:15
It would get to most children's toys? I would assume that's also absolutely a vertical.
Marc Uible 28:23
The cost structure? Yes, we can actually. We have a Shopify app cost structure. Look, I think one of the things we're we're seeing out there is we work best with companies that really want to grow and really want to sell their products and where this is a keen challenge. Okay, they want to, they want to use this not just for a pretty spinning 3D thing on their website, they want to transform the way they sell. And our prices is reflecting that we start at 40,000 a year for software. So that's where we start. Again, we're seeing and it's not all big brands, but if you are, let's say a smaller brand. And but this is you know, you sell a complex, configurable product, like you can't sell that product, if you're not showing it, if that's really important to you. We're the platform to make that happen. If you want to just show something, and it's kind of cool, and it's a little bit of a novelty. There's other solutions for that too. But it's probably not Threekit.
Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson 29:30
Awesome. Well with that it's a wrap already. That was like the fastest 30 minutes in ever, anything. We definitely encourage a follow up conversation with the Threekit team, a Marc, thank you. You always have awesome information. It's always a great discussion. So we greatly appreciate you coming on the line today. And thank you all for attending. I hope to see you on next events. So take care. Have a great rest of the week. Stay safe and we will see you soon. Buh bye to everyone. Adios.