As businesses look to cut costs in uncertain times, AI can be a useful tool for home furnishings retailers and manufacturers, especially when it comes to online product imagery.
That’s why advertising agency R&A Marketing has partnered with visual merchandising technology company Pyxd to streamline the online product merchandising process with an AI-powered product photography platform called PyxMagic.
R&A Marketing clients can now transfer PyxMagic-generated product images to their R&A websites from the PyxMagic platform. Images are automatically formatted and transferred to the retailer’s website with the SKU attached.
The image is available as a draft product on the website back-end so retailers can add additional information like pricing, tags or categories before publishing.
“Our retailers want to present their customers with an online showroom that mirrors the in-store experience, but are often forced to use manufacturer images that may not speak to their customers,” said Kevin Doran, owner of R&A Marketing. “R&A is always evaluating new retailer technologies, partnering with providers that solve real customer challenges. With this integration, R&A customers can use PyxMagic to capture products in-store, transform them into website-ready images and transfer those images to their R&A website to finalize their product builds with just the click of a button.”
The integration is available now and offered at no additional cost to R&A Marketing clients with a PyxMagic subscription.
The collaboration is designed to streamline the time-consuming process of building and merchandising products online, delivering key benefits such as seamless workflow, improved efficiency and time savings.
“PyxMagic was designed with ease of use in mind,” said Gaurav Sethi, co-founder of Pyxd Inc. “Our solution includes a mobile app that allows retailers to capture products from the retail floor and automatically produces studio-quality, website-ready images fast — without the need for expensive equipment, technical editing or lengthy post-processing. The integration with R&A Marketing creates an end-to-end photography and merchandising solution for our customers and aligns perfectly with our objective of making cutting-edge technology accessible and easy to use.”
Early adopters have already seen significant benefits, said Brock Waldrop, who leads sales and marketing at Miller Waldrop, who shared how the integration streamlined their operations.
“The PyxMagic and R&A integration reduced product building by four or five steps, which can save you hours when you’re building 500-plus products,” Waldrop said. “When you account for how much time is saved without downloading media libraries or importing SKUs, the integration speeds up the entire building process.”
Behind the tech
Pyxd was founded by Gaurav Sethi, whose last image production company, Outward, was sold to Williams Sonoma. And he has big plans for this new technology as well.
“We love the idea of making technology much more accessible, enabling myriad different customer and company profiles with beautiful product photography that can compete with studio photography,” Sethi said. “It also allows them to compete with much bigger companies who have much larger budgets. It’s a web service at its core, but we’re finding that the mobile app is resonating strongly with independent retailers because it enables them to capture a picture of a product in any environment. We then automatically produce the image and have it sent to the retailer’s website.”
While he says the majority of the use cases apply to independent retailers, there’s overlap with manufacturers as well. At a fraction of the cost of traditional photography, manufacturers are finding that the advanced capabilities of AI to create realistic landscape images is a less expensive yet just as effective route.
“High-quality silhouettes may cost a couple of thousand for a day’s worth of work — that’s what our service costs on an annual basis. Universally, there are going to be gaps between what you have in inventory and what’s on your sales floor. Couple that with the fact that you’re getting returns and clearance items, and there are going to be large gaps in how you merchandise all of that comprehensively. Those are the gaps that we are trying to fill, first and foremost.”
He adds that it can be hard for retailers to be strategic and not instinctively view it as a cost but rather something that has a great ROI down the road.
“The AI world is moving so fast, and there are a lot of new techniques that have been incubated for quite a while that are starting to come to fruition,” Sethi said. “We’ve created something very simple and high velocity that can get retailers a quality end result.”
