No retailer is the same. While it may seem all retailers have the same challenges (bricks vs. clicks, reduced budgets, more channels to try and engage their consumers on… the list goes on) the fact is that no one challenge is the same. This was especially true of Carpetright. Carpetright are one of the biggest flooring retailers in the UK selling 1000’s of floors (as well as beds) from over 350 stores. With stores closed due to lockdown, Carpetright needed to showcase more of their products online. This was the challenge: find a cost effective solution to produce 100 total different lifestyle images.

We had to find a solution that could produce roomset images for hundreds of pounds rather than thousands.

We split the challenge into 3 steps… product, design and delivery. We needed a fast way to make 100% accurate digital doubles of each of the floors. These doubles would be used as swatches as well as in the lifestyle environment. We then needed a smart way of creating 100 different room environments, not only did these need to differ in room type but also in property style. And the final challenge was how to put these first two elements together to deliver the final images.

Most of the solutions came through proprietary technology within our own tech suite. We used PBR (Physically Based Rendering) scanning technology, coupled with semi-automated processes to reference the floors to a quality better than the highest resolution camera would be able to (way surpassing what would ever be seen by a customer. Our in-house design and styling team then developed a ‘live’ styling process meaning rooms could be propped and styled within hours instead of days, as well as some very different ways of reconfiguring rooms. Next up, the delivery.

The final piece of the challenge was how to bring the digital product and the styled room together.  How to ensure the brand identity and tone of voice was consistent in lighting and propping. And crucially, how to make sure the product was the hero and always looked perfect. We used our automated batch output tool Fusioniser to do this. This bespoke product uses an intelligent back end CMS system with the benefits of CGI to create all 100 final images in a fraction of the time traditional production would take.

All of the these bespoke solutions came together very successfully. Looking at the problem in a slightly different way, investing in new technology and systems resulted in fantastic output. Carly Greening, Marketing Manager of Carpetright, described the images as ten times better than what they had on the site before. We created an answer to a very challenging brief that sets us up for future work with the brand. We also saved tonnes of flooring being shipped to a location shoot and then being scrapped. A win win.