Wickes Furniture Sucessfully Launches The Room Designer Online For Wicke’s Customers

Furniture World Magazine

Wickes Furniture Company Inc., a Top 20 furniture retailer, has successfully launched a unique web-based room designer application technology called the "Room Designer" or also called the "Room Planner" created by Interiors Interactive, Inc. (www.interiorsinteractive.com). The "Room Planner" as Wickes calls the user experience, can be accessed by the home page of the Wickes Furniture website. "Interiors Interactive’s visualization platform reduces the consumer’s uncertainty in the buying process and thereby increases the consumer’s retention and loyalty," said Scott Castell, CFO of Wickes Furniture. The Room Planner has surprisingly enough, already generated thousands of dollars of sales. Wickes would not disclose the amount. Wickes Furniture and Interiors Interactive have entered into an agreement that enabled Wickes Furniture to deploy II’s Digital Asset Product Process‘ (DAPP‘ Methodology), which slashes costs and production time for Wickes Furniture by digitizing furniture, fabrics, and other tangible items and enabling their instantaneous and easy manipulation on the web. By using this application through a standard web browser, Wickes Furniture customers visualize, experiment and custom design a room in photo quality in the privacy of their own home and in real-time. Top retailers and manufacturers understand the importance of merchandising and romancing their customers. This is especially true for manufacturers and retailers of expensive and highly stylized products like furniture, cars or jewelry etc. Off-line, these companies rely heavily on a complex mix of visual clues, mood, aesthetics and "implied" lifestyles to sell their products. Off-line, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year to do that through advertising images and store merchandising. But online, these companies are finding it difficult to maintain and to create the "romance" of their brand because they do not have access to the right visualization tools that will help them. Michelle Bourdelais, studio executive of Interiors Interactive in Boston, Massachusetts, remarked, "Wickes Furniture understands the revolution of interactive merchandising." Wickes Furniture is demonstrating its commitment to personalized, interactive, one-to-one merchandizing that integrates the "brick" and "click" channels seamlessly, building lifetime value with customers across all touchpoints.