Working with Live Furnish to improve product imagery has helped retailer Great American Home Store increase product views and click-throughs on its website by 62 percent and boost its in-store and online sales by 46 percent. In addition, they have experienced an average increase of 72 percent in ‘Adds to Cart’ with up to 644 percent in big ticket items added to cart.
“Obsessive product display, both in-store and online, has always been in our bloodstream,” said Justin Bowen, eCommerce manager at Memphis-based Great American Home Store. “We knew our customers looked to us for inspiration, and we wanted their online experience to mirror what they saw in-store. But for a long time, we were frustrated with the lack of quality product imagery we could obtain from our vendors. And as a five-store chain, we just didn’t have the resources necessary to hire an in-house photographer or to create an adequate in-house photography studio.”
“In an effort to solve their problem, the Great American Home Store was shooting about 30 percent of their photography themselves, but when retailers are forced to shoot products on-site, it’s typically limited to a white background and silo images,” said Preet Sahil Singh, CEO of Live Furnish, the leading 3D content creation technology platform for the home furnishings industry. “Our theory, which they have since proven, is that lifestyle shots always perform better on a website because more people prefer to view room scenes over silo images.”
It took just two weeks to train the retailer’s six-person content team to use the Live Furnish platform to create quality lifestyle images. “They were not graphic artists or photographers, and certainly not 3D modelers,” Bowen said. “The majority were customer service personnel. But the software is intuitive enough that anybody who has ever played a video game can figure this out. Our team quickly picked it up, and since they spend a lot of their time working in spreadsheets or chat, creating lifestyle images that mirror our in-store presentations is a good change of pace in their workday that they find satisfying and exciting.”
The results speak for themselves. In fact, according to Bowen, since launching with Live Furnish, Great American Home Store has enjoyed 72 percent higher “adds to cart” overall, with a 644 precent lift in big-ticket items added to cart.
“Working with Live Furnish has enabled us to create quality lifestyle imagery in-house, reliably, consistently, and affordably, and we are now able to build all of our content ourselves, including our product videos,” he said. “This is critical because it has allowed us to control our brand vision, and allowed our buyers to create virtually exclusive products with fabric choices and case goods finishes that the manufacturer may not have photographed. We can picture the product just as we sell it, and that gives us a clear point of view and helps us stand out in a marketplace dominated by very well-known brands.”