Outward Inc. Introduces Data-Driven Path To High-Value Visual Merchandising
Furniture World News Desk on
1/20/2017
San Jose, California-based Outward Inc. recently introduced a solution that breaks the merchandising bottleneck that has plagued most retailers for decades. Outward’s technology and data-driven platform delivers large volumes of digital assets with practically infinite SKU scalability. Outward helps enterprise customers “future-proof” and transform their approach to merchandising by enabling both traditional and interactive digital experiences for their products.
Pick any manufacturer with thousands of items for sale, or any retailer with millions of them, and the problem remains constant: too many items to market at one end of the chain and customers demanding almost infinite selection and granularity at the other. At best, we’ve had the 20th century’s catalog model, whether online or on paper, presenting a tsunami of SKUs that shoppers must plod through until time or patience runs out.
“We have created an end-to-end visual experience,” says Clarence Chui, Co-founder & CEO of Outward, Inc. “a new model today’s world needed. Budgets haven’t changed. Trucks haven’t changed. But expectations at the customer end of the chain have changed drastically, and manufacturers now have the ability to create nearly anything. We’ve figured out how to bridge that gap between manufacturing and merchandising, and bring more value to everyone in the process.”
Capture: Beyond Imaging
Founded in October 2012, Outward now boasts a growing roster of enterprise customers, including many of the best known lifestyle brands in the home industry. These companies faced decades-old merchandising inefficiencies. Marketing any given product required manufacturing a prototype, shipping it to a hosting facility, hiring a creative team to stage and photograph it, managing that digital asset, and then distributing that asset to the appropriate channels. Apply the process to many thousands of items, each of which may have scores or hundreds of sub-models and choices (fabric, accents, etc), and costs skyrocket.
Outward founders Clarence Chui and Gaurav Sethi developed a technology and process to fundamentally change their brand partners’ mindset by bridging the enormous gap between manufacturing and merchandising capabilities. Their vision is to enable enterprises in the home industry to transform their approach to merchandising by providing highly personalized and immersive digital experiences for the consumer, with a high level of visual quality.
“There are potentially millions of permutations in how a product can be customized,” says Outward’s Gaurav Sethi. “Most are just not visualized, but our model allows us to scale. We can create these huge volumes — all in photo-realistic 3D — for an incredible number of SKUs and brands, all in parallel. Essentially, we can capture full companies in a very short period.”
Leverage: Cycling From Sales to Smarts
While the use of virtually created image content alone saves merchandisers considerable operational expense, Outward’s deeper value springs from other ways in which the product assortment can be leveraged. Through API integration and quick setup, enterprises can enable a wide range of product-related experiences on their site, tailored to the specific needs of a brand with Outward’s in house cloud platform.
Outward can craft a complete 3D virtual setting to showcase products, including interactive “walk-throughs,” which feed to a merchandiser’s site. Customers can recreate their home environments, plan future spaces, or examine how factors such as lighting and placement can impact a potential purchase’s “feel.”
Most competing approaches for interactive product experiences use 3D modeling and rendering techniques from the gaming world, which don’t yield photorealistic quality. However, a better visual experience means fewer returns, more consumer confidence in making a purchase decision, and increased likelihood of repeat business.
Proof in the Platform
Outward’s a data-centric merchandising platform is already transforming its first target market. Its cloud-supported applications allow the company to provide interactive experiences all along the merchandising and sales funnel. The company’s platform simultaneously powers a range of consumer, product-centric experiences , each tailored to align with the brand image of Outward partners.
“We’re seeing conversion rates get significant lifts for our customers,” says Outward’s Clarence Chui. “It’s still early, but we’re hearing that the difference between not using our interactive experiences and using it yields about a 30% revenue gain in some cases — that’s 30% in a world where a few percent is a huge deal.”
More about Outward: Founded in 2012, From front-end imaging and asset capture to a back-end, analytics-driven management platform, Outward provides visual merchandising that supports the scale and diversity of products offered by customer brands, as well as flexibility in enabling a breadth of digital “experiences” tailored to support all stages of a brand’s merchandising throughout its sales chain. The company has raised over $8M in equity financing from Merus Capital. Outward currently supports a portfolio of customers that includes some of today’s highest profile lifestyle and specialty brands in the home furnishing and decorative accessory space. For more information, visit
www.outward.com.