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From Home Furnishing Business
Simpli Home Names imagine.io Primary CGI Model Partner
June 22,
2023 by HFBusiness Staff in Business Strategy, Industry 
Major e-commerce retailer Simpli Home, a leading direct to consumer brand specializing in high value, handcrafted solid wood furnishings across numerous style categories, has adopted imagine.io’s 3D platform for creation of their online visual content, including product and lifestyle imagery and videos.
“Superlative imagery is vital for an online-only brand like Simpli Home, since shoppers cannot walk into a store to touch and feel the product they are interested in purchasing,” said Preet Singh, founder of imagine.io.
Yet traditional lifestyle photography would be prohibitive for a brand like Simpli Home that produces 400 to 600 new SKUs annually. Indeed, said Darcy McGilvery, chief marketing officer, Simpli Home, “CGI is really the only answer for us in terms of logistics and cost-efficiency.”
Simpli Home named imagine.io its primary partner in CGI model production this year “after the company ‘outcompeted’ all of our other CGI vendors,” McGilvery said. “Beyond photo-realistic imagery, consumers shopping online today want 360-degree views of the products they are purchasing.”
“Millennial and Gen-Z consumers also now expect augmented reality experiences, where they can actually see how the furniture will look in their space. Imagine.io is the industry leader in 3D technology. Imagine.io is at the cutting edge of 3D and hyper-realistic visualization technology and is constantly ahead of the curve. They are a great partner in managing our CGIs.”
While imagine.io continues to serve as the retailer’s primary CGI platform, Simpli Home has begun exploring the self-service aspect of the technology platform to empower the brand and its employees.
“Producing our own CGI models would require hiring as many as 30 full-time CGI artists to handle the sheer volume of new products annually,” McGilvery said. “Yet, when an agency creates all of your 3D models, as well as your lifestyle images, there’s a lot of back-and-forth that’s very time-consuming and expensive.”
“We did a lot of research, and imagine.io is the easiest, most viable self-serve solution that produces photorealistic output. It’s not something that we can adopt overnight, but our goal now is to assume full creative control of our lifestyle images, producing photo-realistic content that can’t be found anywhere else, and to realize undeniable cost saving while we are doing it.”
Overall, “We strive for imagery that feels both accessible and authentic,” said Nikita Chand, CGI junior manager at Simpli Home. “We think consumers should be able to easily visualize sharing their space with loved ones, so we work to feature a wide variety of home types—urban, suburban, and vacation—with a mix of wall and floor styles.”
“Imagine.io ensures our images provide a consistent, whole-room point of view that reflects our brand, and that our visual settings are unrestricted. We can control the lighting, add custom moldings, change wall colors, and even change the views outside of the windows in a room scene.”