The Ultimate Guide to 3D for D2C Brands | imagine.io

Despite the additional work that goes into delivering a D2C brand to consumers, there are a number of benefits to consider.

We’ve identified 7 significant benefits for D2C brands:

Brand control: The traditional manufacturer/retailer relationship provides little room for manufacturers to control their brand image. Ultimately it’s the retailers that present the product to the consumer, and once the product is in the hands of retailers, there's no guarantee that marketing specifications passed down from the manufacturer will influence a sale. With D2C, brands who own their products at every step of the customer journey are able to understand their buyers better and adjust their marketing to influence sales. 

Scalability: The D2C model allows manufacturers to launch new products at a smaller scale, test with selected demographics, and collect data. This gives manufacturers the chance to understand what customers want, produce more of what sells, and less of what doesn’t, and improve their product offering. In a non-D2C environment, retailers are forced to limit inventory and stock products that are proven to sell. This restricts manufacturers to produce only what retailers deem worth selling because it’s not worth the cost to test out new products. 

Data Collection: The opportunity for manufacturers to collect customer data via direct marketing and advertising reveals greater opportunity to learn about what their consumers really want. Retailers may be missing out on some key consumer trends for products and are not communicating that information to the manufacturers. Through better data collection, manufacturers can optimize existing products, and, possibly, create completely new product lines.

Higher margins: By eliminating the middleman, D2C brands can sell their products at the same price as retailers, which ultimately improves the bottom line. Obviously, no middleman means no markup from cost to gross sale, and with growing supply chain concerns, selling directly has a clear cost advantage.

Brand loyalty: When consumers buy through retail, they’re unlikely to ask who manufactured the product, so it’s nearly impossible to build brand loyalty and recurring sales. But in a D2C environment, manufacturers have the opportunity to be highly visible to customers and show up for them through quality product, customer service, and more. This creates strong brand relationships and long-term customer retention.

Owned Content: Every D2C brand needs to create content for multiple channels. Rather than relying on retailers to create visuals to effectively market their products, often with limited resources, D2C brands can own the entire content strategy to best represent their products and their target consumers. The ability to control your own content is three-fold:

1) You are not at the mercy of retailers to get your content on brand.
2) You can always adapt your content for more targeted audiences.
3) You can test your content for better results.

Going global: Without retailers or distributors in certain locales, manufacturers are no longer restricted by geography. The world is their oyster. It's just a matter of selling to the right customer segments in the right market.

Flexibility: As mentioned, the opportunity to adapt and change to consumer trends and buying patterns can dramatically improve your D2C sales versus relying on Consumers can have unpredictable needs. This means it's always a good idea to create forward-looking plans to ensure that the model remains consistent and not stagnant when it comes to customer demand.

Since direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands directly communicate with their customers, creating quality content assets has never been more important. A 3D visualization platform, like imagine.io, can be an affordable and easy alternative to creating the content required for your D2C brand to stand out versus traditional photography. 

D2C Brands: Creating A 3D Content Strategy

Every organization needs a content strategy to compete in today’s marketplace. For D2C brands in the home furnishings space, visual content reigns supreme for converting visitors into buyers. Copy and written content is also a necessary part of any content strategy but for the purpose of this discussion, let’s focus on the visual assets that you’ll use to engage your target audience and convert them into customers…

There are many different types of 3D content you can create. The most successful D2C brands take a mixed approach to content strategy, which involves a number of key visual pieces. This includes:

• Lifestyle imagery
• Silhouettes
• Vignettes
• Video
• AR/VR
• Product Configurators

Let’s discuss how each type of 3D content can be used and how it enables D2C brands to go to market faster, sell more, increase customer satisfaction, and generate ongoing brand loyalty. 

We know D2C companies can benefit greatly from 3D content. Improvement in quality of visualizations brings a number of benefits as well as a competitive advantage. To further drive the point home, let’s uncover some of these major benefits and why 3D beats traditional photography every time. 

1. Product Design Quality

The process of manufacturing products is a major undertaking, and errors in that process can prove costly and inefficient resulting in wasted money, wasted samples, and wasted time. The option to create furniture prototypes using 3D can drastically reduce errors in product design, ensuring each component is reviewed and manufactured according to specification. 

2. Improved Interaction And Customer Experience

The imagine.io curator allows you to see products from a 360 degree angle. You can take product shots from every angle and ensure customers see your product in all aspects. Additionally, through product configuration, you can give customers the option to change colors, fabrics and finishes in realtime and allow them to customize their own products to their liking. This option results in 11x conversions compared to 2D images created using studio photography. 

3. Easier Thematic Marketing

Instead of doing different photoshoots at different marketing seasons like Halloween, Easter or Christmas, manufacturers and retailers have a choice of different lifestyle templates for each. It only takes a few hours to create a whole year’s worth of content, enabling you to concentrate on other vital tasks.

4. Cost-Effectiveness

The process of rendering 3D imagery is much more affordable compared to hourly studio photography, videography, or CGI agencies.  A 3D content platform like imagine.io provides the perfect solution for D2C brands to create catalogs of products for less money and achieve better results from their imagery. For example, The Great American Home Store was able to increase same-product sales by 46% using 3D imagery on their eCommerce shop.  

5. Time-Savings

3D saves a tremendous amount of time for D2C brands to go to market faster and get their products in front of consumers. 3D greatly increases the design-to-production time of a product, cutting out errors and waste, while marketing your product is a breeze in comparison to in-house photography, studio photography or on-location photography, which can take months, even years, to produce.

6. Easier Manufacturing

As we've mentioned, creating 3D models helps avoid costly design errors, reduces waste, and improves sustainability. You can find out if something is wrong before it goes to production, make adjustments before creating a physical sample, and it simplifies and reduces all manufacturing processes. For D2C brands, 3D is a no brainer.

7. Enhancing Visual Communication

Lastly, it helps with marketing and advertising thereby helping you increase your sales and increase your return on investments. You can create stunning advertising campaigns using furniture renderings which will increase preorders dramatically. 

3D lifestyle imagery can present furniture collections in the best way possible, allowing you to tell an engaging and successful story that engages your customers.