It’s not every day that you see an umbrella company doubling as a 3D modeling service with a full content team dedicated to 3D content creation.
But California Umbrella isn’t like other umbrella manufacturers, and it’s done just that with the goal of offering its customers and partners lifelike 3D models of outdoor furniture, umbrellas and more.
Bryan Sanches, senior vice president, says the tool was created to meet the business need of a few of its customers and grew into a robust program that allows other manufacturers to make their products and create assets quickly.
“And then for brick-and-mortar retail or e-commerce customers that want to white label product and be able to produce their own asset, we can do that for them,” he adds. “So we’re able to do this for any product.”
Now, any manufacturer or retailer can get 3D product models made of their furniture from this 3D modeling service, as the company has an entire team working full time on content creation.
The service includes both high and low poly images, 3D product silos, a range of customized image sets, lifestyle visualization, as well as 360 spin images, which are a type of interactive image that allows the viewer to rotate the object or product in a full circle, providing a comprehensive view from all angles.
Models are priced in four different categories, from Simple models to Highly Complex 3D models, and a 3D asset library offers material textures and lifestyle scenes with the flexibility to adjust any angle.
Sanches explains that California Umbrella has aimed to make itself a reliable last-minute supplier that its customers can lean on for inventory. He says the company had to learn a lot to become that kind of a supplier, and one of the things they learned how to do is produce content quickly.
The company’s business is split nearly 50/50 between e-commerce retailers and commercial/brick-and-mortar stores. Because of that split, Sanches said 3D content is even more important, and that this is probably the biggest barrier to entry for a lot of companies.
“How do you cover a wide spectrum of your product assortment without spending literally millions of dollars on photo shoots and post-production and things like that?” Sanches asks. “We turned our attention to 3D modeling services because the industry was asking for these types of images, and we were using third-party content studios — which turned out to be very informative in terms of the realistic pain points manufacturers face with image use limitations.”
That’s when they brought the service in-house, which gave them more quality control over the content, and Sanches says one of the most obvious benefits is that now companies don’t have to go through the process of sampling and photo-shooting all of their product.
“This service allows our customers to partner with us to, for example, do an online program using the stock that they bought for a retail store,” Sanches says. “And we can generate completely unique images and content for that so that they can put it online without having it shopped across a whole bunch of other websites — it can really be their own program. And then they can use those images for their own marketing for social media, banners and posters, and advertising and email ads, etc.”
Umbrella world
As for the company’s growth in the past few years, Sanches says 2021 was its biggest sales year ever, but he noticed there was a lot of consolidation happening within the company’s customer base in 2022.
“In 2021, there were a lot of players investing in outdoor furnishing products and building up their programs,” Sanches says. “And in 2022, there was a lot less of that. So the people that were deep in the business had good strengths and were more successful, and so they continued to consolidate.”
Because the company does a large amount of e-commerce business, Sanches says he looks at that as his day-to-day indicator of consumer activity, as opposed to brick-and-mortar retail, which is a bit more planned.
“In the last hour, you can see how sales were, the effects of the weather or bad news on that; you see a change in how many orders come in during that six-hour period,” Sanches explains. “I would say from that, consumer activity contracted significantly in the last six months of last year. We had an uptick in commercial business as a result.”
Sanches says that in his experience, what happens at the end of one season has a little bit of a hangover effect into the next year. So if things are going really strong at the end of the year, they’re going to start strong next year, and if they’re weak, they’re going to be weak.
“And that’s because of the seasonal nature of our business,” he explains. “Things taper off as it gets colder or people are buying other things at an inflated price. That’s been the story for Q1.”
However, Sanches is optimistic about 2023 because the company never stopped production and has a lot of control over the flow of orders.
“We were able to keep a production line flowing and dial things down in terms of containers,” he says. “And we have a flow of inventory that’s ready to leave the factory, and a flow of inventory that’s being depleted domestically that we can keep balanced throughout the calendar year.”
