Fatboy, a company that manufactures and sells premium, high-quality indoor and outdoor lifestyle products, including the Fatboy Original bean bag chair, has an average basket size between $250 and $300, with shoppers buying an average of 1.5 products per purchase. Since shoppers often have long gaps between site visits and purchases, the company turned to augmented reality to showcase some of its best products on its desktop and mobile web sites.
Fatboy became one of the first retailers to adopt CGTrader ARsenal, an AR platform designed to leverage 3D modeling to enable online shoppers to experience lifestyle products immediately in their home environments.
“Unlike IKEA where it pays off to invest in a complete proprietary AR platform, for us it is not an option,” said Tom de Vos, E-Commerce Director of Fatboy in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “This allows us to have as good as an IKEA app without needing to invest in an app — we just need to select five products that amass 60% of our product turnover, transform them via AR and have them live on our web site.”
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Fatboy had initially set a target date of 2021 for an AR rollout, but the easy implementation of the ARsenal technology accelerated the company’s plans, de Vos noted.
“We just had to send some 2D pictures to them and very rapidly they could convert this into augmented reality models that we could then plug and play into our web site,” said de Vos. “We have three products that are live now on our U.S. web site, and we are working on extending the entire assortment. Right now, we our redesigning our web site so we can integrate AR in our entire web page in a better way.”
Improving 3D product visualization benefits both Fatboy’s e-Commerce presence and its own retail partners that sell the products both online and in-store.
“The next step is offering this to other retailers,” de Vos said. “In the U.S., we are selling to Macy’s, and in Europe, we have some very big omnichannel clients. In the long term, we are looking to assist physical stores as well that are struggling right now with keeping our products, which are oversized, in stock. The AR solution allows them, in combination with a drop shipping solution, to basically have an endless aisle assortment of Fatboy products in-store.”
AR Rollout Stems From Ease Of Use, Large Designer Community
For Fatboy, the selection of ARsenal came down to two key factors. First, “we can pick the products we want, send the image and then they can transform this product into a 3D image that can be viewed in augmented reality,” de Vos said. “This leads to the second point of how easy it is — we just can copy and paste the link and we have AR.”
Additionally, Fatboy reduces the need for expensive product photoshoots, as the 3D models can be based on images from a product link or even a photo taken with a mobile phone. Additionally, the company doesn’t need a heavy upfront investment in highly skilled 3D designers to create a new mobile app, since the CGTrader community already includes nearly 2 million 3D designers and close to 10 years of 3D design experience.
The ARsenal solution includes features such as:
- Photorealistic 3D modeling for any volume of products/SKUs;
- Seamless AR integration with the retailer’s online store using single-click embedded links;
- Flexible 2D-to-3D product conversion plans based on monthly volume and budget requirements;
- An integrated 3D Model Viewer; and
- A centralized 3D Model portal for 3D model management and storage.
The 3D models developed using CGTrader ARsenal are available on both Apple AR Quick Look and Android ARCore Scene Viewer, which come standard on Apple and Android mobile devices respectively. Shoppers don’t need additional software to view the 3D models in AR on mobile iOS and Android devices.
