Outward, Inc. is happy to be one of the Home Furnishings Association’s newest Solution Partners, providing its members with product photography tools and services to improve the way they do business.
Retailers need high-quality product photography
We understand that retailers must put their best foot forward when promoting their product offerings to their customers. And generating high-quality, accurate, and branded product photographs have become a critical step in engaging today’s consumers as they research and purchase online.
At Outward, our research tells us that most consumers now land on a specific product page thanks to a direct product link or Google search vs. the home page. So making the first impression on each product page and capturing that customer’s interest is more important than ever. Outward can help furniture retailers optimize and merchandise these product pages with the key visual elements a consumer needs to make a purchasing decision.
We’ve developed our Aperture Platform to put you in control of one of the most important success drivers for your business—your product images.
How the Aperture Platform works
We’ve distilled a mix of technologies, honed over nearly ten years of helping leading lifestyle brands produce visual content, into a single visual merchandising platform that replaces the need for photographers, high-priced studio time, specialized editing, or post-processing.
Aperture Platform automates the product photography process for retailers to provide professional ready-to-use images in minutes without photography or editing expertise. The platform allows companies to easily capture an entire product line and produce silhouettes on a white and contextual background at a fraction of the time and cost of a traditional photographer and studio set-up and with better, more realistic results than CGI vendors. Users can immediately deploy finalized imagery on their various marketing channels like social media, e-commerce websites, traditional print publications, and more.
The platform includes two steps: capture and create. The capture process is meant to ease the logistical burden of traditional photography. A photo rig is assembled on your premises wherever furniture moves around, like a warehouse, distribution center, or back room. The Aperture Capture Tool is intuitive and designed so that any team member moving furniture can consistently capture items without any photography or marketing experience. Once the furniture item is captured, it’s uploaded to a cloud-based software tool that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to process the image to your brand’s lighting and background specifications. Once processed, which takes only minutes, marketing or sales team members can access the second step, create. Users can log in using the secure web-based Aperture Content Manager to pull ready-to-use processed images or use our tools to adjust lighting and backgrounds to create specialized imagery on demand.
Debuting at the October 2021 High Point Market, the platform is already being delivered to a growing roster of home furnishings retailers and manufacturers. Hoot Judkins Furniture, the Bay Area’s largest wood furniture store, had this to say about the platform:
“We chose to use the Aperture Platform to quickly develop high-quality imagery for our merchandising needs across our website, brochures, and social media,” said Vicki Marchant, owner of Hoot Judkins Furniture. “The accuracy of this technology is very impressive, and it accomplishes merchandising goals for us that would be very hard to do without it. The set-up and photography processes are so streamlined, and the technology automatically edits shadows and backgrounds to fit exactly what we are looking for.”
Click here to find out more about how Outward can help you as an HFA member.
Check out the Outward HFA Quick Click Solution video.
