Putting the Product Imagery Lifecycle in Hyperdrive, with Preet Singh, Founder and CEO at Imagine.io

Transcript

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Lauren Livak Gilbert (00:00):

Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where industry leaders share insights, strategies, and stories to help brands win in the ever-changing world of commerce.

Peter Crosby (00:22):

Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here from The Digital Shelf Institute. The proven power of quantity and quality of digital imagery in the shopping journey is only going to increase in an era of agentic commerce, but meeting that moment requires a much more automated, scalable, and timely process for managing that product imagery lifecycle. Preet Singh, founder and CEO at imagine.io, is a strong advocate of the need to compress and combine the product development and imagery development lifecycles to get products to market faster with all the imagery needed to inspire, convince, and convert for any use case and conversation. Welcome to the podcast, Preet. We are so happy to have you here. Thank you for joining us.

Preet Singh (01:09):

Hey, so nice to meet you guys, and thank you for having me here.

Peter Crosby (01:13):

Oh, of course. I mean, you spend your day and probably nights thinking about how brands can imagine, see what I did with your name, their products on the digital shelf, and how to make it easier for them to get product images to retailers. Now, that always takes multiple teams. It's different types of file types, multiple systems, 3D, I mean, all of it has become so complex, but also so important to the conversion and now certainly with ag agentic AI to the information that must be needed to be able to make conversion and discovery happen. So we want you to break down for us what the modern process and capabilities are to do this really well, but you have a really unique background, so if you can just start with where you started and how you got to imagine, that would be great.

Preet Singh (02:04):

Awesome. Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's an interesting topic as to how companies take that products from concept to design to really to market and throughout all of their sales channels. But yeah, a little bit about me. I grew up in India. My dad was Indian military it, so I kind of grew up around computers, built games as a kid, a lot of the small video games. So

Peter Crosby (02:31):

A nerd is what you're telling me pretty much. Yeah, you could say

Preet Singh (02:34):

That. Yeah, so I kind of grew up around computers a lot, and then as my parents did, I went to engineering school, SEO was new back then, worked a lot on web systems and then worked at a large aerospace company that makes fighter aircrafts, and I used to lead the virtual reality division for Asia Pacific, so learned a lot about visualization, CAD pipelines, product design, really getting into the inside of how a product is designed, manufactured quality checked, rolled out, so got a lot of hands-on experience with that. Then went out and started my first company where we built a lot of the interactive experiences around configuring your car, configuring your motorcycle, being a motorcyclist. I love those projects. And then slowly ventured into using cameras for experience, which is like, Hey, let's try on clothes without having to actually physically put them on or try different projection techniques.

(03:40):

So spent a lot of time there and then started to realize all of the content that was being produced from my last company was got to do everything around the product. Any product that a company launches, they're all like, we want to give all of the different visuals, all of the different experiences, interactions, customizations related to that specific product. And that's really where Imagine was born was with the fact of, Hey, how can we make production of visuals and commercialization of products that are in the design cycle much faster, much easier? And that led us here today

Lauren Livak Gilbert (04:20):

From an aerospace engineer to e-commerce. I feel like there's even more stories in there that we can do a whole podcast about, but what a really, really cool background. Thank you for sharing that. So you talked about creating products and creating the images and the renderings, and I know we've kind of moved from CGI was best practice and now there's more AR 3D renderings and people might be using AI to create the renderings. So can you talk a bit about where you've seen that shift and then also maybe what are some of the challenges that are happening today around product images and renderings?

Preet Singh (04:59):

Yeah, this is awesome. I'd love to give a little bit of background on this. The interesting thing with the technology shifts like AI is that it doesn't really reduce the want of the consumers. It actually amplifies it. Now people want more because they can consume more and AI can deliver fully consumed, understood contextual information to you, and you really need so much more info now, especially around product visual. So think of it like this, right? We did a research, and in that research what we found out that about 90% of people that shopped online said visuals are the single most important reason as to why we buy and what converts us. And if you look at the real estate that images used to take 10 years ago on an e-com, PDP versus the amount of space and time they consume now, it's just been growing consistently just looking at the real estate and the amount of time spent on it.

(06:11):

So starting from, if we think about not imagery, but product imagery or product content, it stems from the product, whereas the product stems itself directly from the CAD design, the sketch data, the design data that was generated to then manufacture the product. So best in class is actually two or three steps for current companies in the market is how do I utilize existing design data that can often come in complex 3D formats, mostly for engineers, mostly for manufacturing folks. How do I take that super accurate shape data, bring it into e-commerce and marketing and sales to really use it to generate my product content without having to wait for a sample to be made, the sample to be shipped from the factory, then send it to a photography studio, photograph it, share it. That's too long a process and too expensive, makes you super slow.

(07:22):

And if you want to be agile, you want to be using an existing CAD data piece that already exists inside of the company. So that was best practice until maybe a year ago. Now that best practice still involves CAD data, but it's been extended further earlier was you get your CAD data, you clean it up, and then you render it using various different softwares and platforms and asset libraries. Now you're still doing that, but you can use the initial images that you get from the CAD data using generative AI to make the rendering process a lot faster. So where it would take a specialist, a three DR, someone who knows these tools to now then a simplified platform to now generate AI where it understands your brand and generates videos, generates content by looking at the CAD data. So it's CAD to 3D rendering to CAD to 3D, rendering to AI generation in the middle. That's really the pipeline that we're seeing because any good experience, you will see product shots, dimensional images, silhouettes, beautiful lifestyle imagery that lifts the brand and really makes it more desirable. Then video content, because videos as we know is a big conversion kicker, and then we have three sixties and augmented reality. Now think about this. I just gave you names of at least six to seven different types of asset visual assets that you need to sell online. So that stems from 3D and AI now working together,

Peter Crosby (09:07):

I would imagine Preet, in addition to this new process, creating imagery hopefully more quickly and efficiently, that it's also probably guaranteeing accuracy more because it's coming from the source. So I'm getting a thumbs up from you. Tell us why that's true and that it's a good thing.

Preet Singh (09:34):

Yeah, I mean, think about this, right? Whenever we're manufacturing something, we're essentially making a mold or we're forging something, and it has to be super accurate. When we design in CAD, generally we're designing a micron level, which is 10 to the power minus six inaccuracy. So the design data is extremely accurate in terms of shape. Then you have physical samples that are converted into what we call in our industry, PBR materials. PBR is physically based rendering, which essentially means that those materials will behave and react to light and color the same way as the real material would. Once you have these two pieces put together, that is where all of the magic happens is using that in different scenarios, using that in different places to be able to generate a social media post, an e-com, PDP image, an A plus content, a descriptive feature image.

(10:38):

All of this gets generated from that same part because it's so accurate and it's so relevant to exactly what you are producing. But this is really interesting. Back in the day, aerospace, automobile, a lot of these industries moved away from physical prototypes. They moved into fully digital prototypes that was helping them save a lot of time, effort, money while making sure everything was accurate. Right? Now, imagine if you didn't have to do a physical prototype in the space of say, furniture or in the space of appliances where you could just do a digital prototype and then use it to commercialize your product while the product is still under development, but it's in a stage where it's still six months away from the product to being shipped to you and you can start selling. That's really where we often see like, hey, we were launching eight weeks after we received the first samples to now we are launching as soon as we receive the sample, because by the time we get the sample, we're already ready with all the commercialization work, we're already ready with all the pictures, the videos, the content that we need because now we can work off of this digital asset

Lauren Livak Gilbert (12:00):

And Preet, is that the concept of the digital twin that you're talking about, which I know has become more of a popular term, especially when you're trying to develop a totally new product and test it out and see if it will work, is that's the same concept you're talking about.

Preet Singh (12:13):

Yeah, digital twin is a really cool concept, but it's a little larger than just visuals. So digital twin will encompass the working manufacturing model of your product with all of the metadata, mathematical properties, everything attached. Now, a part of the digital twin is also the visual twin, which includes all the materials, the finishes, as to how the product will look realistically. So that digital twin is really becoming very, very powerful because think about this in the next few years as we enter the metaverse, and you've seen how Zap just launched the new glasses with the AR functionality, and we saw the Apple Vision Pro a while ago and the Oculus turned into the Met Quest. So we're all moving in that direction of being into a more augmented and virtual environment using simple devices like glasses. As we get there, your digital twins and your visual twins are going to power the experience on those glasses and on those future devices.

(13:25):

So companies now investing and building up their visual and digital twins are going to be at the forefront of being able to really adopt all of the new interfaces, all of the new technologies, and thus power all of the latest experiences that customers will be on. So think about this, if 20 years ago you were starting a D two c e-commerce site and you had the most dope visuals of all your products, oh, you'd be killing it from day one, right? But that's exactly what's going to happen as we enter the metaverse, as we enter more experiential domains is where your digital twins are going to power a lot of the interactions that your customers are going to have with it. So commercialization today may be e-comm on a browser, commercialization tomorrow could be e-comm inside of a spatial and experiential platform. So that digital twin is going to really power that experience in the long term.

Peter Crosby (14:27):

It's going to be the chip in my head, that's what I'm sure is coming next. Whether I'm there or not,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (14:33):

I'm waiting for my Iron Man table where I can move on the movie, where you can move stuff around and holograms pop up. That's what I'm waiting for.

Peter Crosby (14:42):

Well, let's make sure everyone's ready for that for sure. And Prius, you're talking about this really new product imagery lifecycle. All I can see is the silos across all of these groups that you're talking about that need to come down in order for that information to happen. Tell me, as you engage with your customers on this, how do you see these teams come to come together? Who's backing the effort to make this contraction of time to market and wealth of imagery happen? Where's the force coming from to make this get put into place?

Preet Singh (15:27):

Yeah, I feel like it's alignment with business goals. Whenever we speak to so many different companies, so many departments in marketing, sales, e-commerce, creative production, here is just some of our learnings and maybe understanding of the market as we see it today. E-commerce teams need the imagery the most because they're the ones that most deeply understand the connection between quantity and quality of product visuals and conversion. They're the ones that see its effect the most on their jobs. Second, we see creative teams are kind of not growing in size and number, but more is expected from them year over year. So I can see how we're able to see how creative teams are under pressure to deliver more with less. The third that we see is oftentimes marketing teams that really want to focus and push on product imagery or product visualization, and they seem to struggle with how much money it costs to work with outside agencies and how long it takes, and they don't know once they have the 3D data, are they investing in it or is it an expense that they need to write off?

(16:57):

That's where I see most of these teams. Then we often work with product development teams that are right there in the CAD design process to help them prototype faster. And overall, if I was to take a few steps back, I would say there is a major disconnect in the industry where the commercialization teams are not aware of all the data that exists with design and manufacturing that is actually a gold mine that they're sitting on, but they don't have the know-how of how to utilize that. It's like you will see how often people get lost in conversations about file formats. The beautiful thing about formats is they can be interchanged from one format to another. That's why it's a format, because can now be taken from one and written into another. So there is so much data available every time we start working with the customer, we uncover the amount of data that they already have that they are not using, and by utilizing that data is really where we are seeing companies that have taken up the process of saying, we are going to use CAD data, we're going to utilize it in every possible way, really are seeing the highest value today.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (18:20):

I remember this just sparked something, my brain on the brand side, when we finally got connected to the team that did the packaging flats and we were like, oh, you have the claims and the ingredient information. Why don't we just pull this instead of recreating the wheel? So I definitely encourage you to breed's point, go talk to your supply chain team. Go talk to your RD team, find the package flats, find the CAD files. Where do they live? How can you use them? How can you use AI to extract information from them? I fundamentally agree, it is a gold mine of data. You do not need to recreate it as you go through your digital shelf process. It already exists. So Pritt, along those lines of some great little nuggets to take away, what are some other best practices that you would recommend for brands as they're thinking about their product image lifecycle starting from the creation of the CAD file?

Preet Singh (19:11):

Yeah, I mean, see, it's kind of like turning it on its head. If we look at how companies and industries have worked for so many years is we're going to sketch a design. We're going to then make a different bunch of colorized sketches, talk to our colleagues, seek approval, go into cad, start doing the drawings and the shapes in 3D, then build out those prototypes and show them to internal teams, which will include marketing, sales, product pricing, everyone, engineering, simulation. And then they will make decisions, make changes, and then come down to a selection of say, 200 products out of maybe say 1000 designs that were close to final and then take those products to market. And then when they take those products to market, on average, at least in the home furnishing space, we see about 50% of those final 200 products never make it to market.

(20:16):

They don't get enough orders. So then you have a hundred out of a thousand that actually made it to market, and that's been the process all along. It's iterative. That's how people have gone about it. Now, think about this. You had a concept and you built out all of the commercial content for that concept like it was a real product like it was ready to sell. And using that as the center point for design for discussing changes to the product, getting retailers and other potential buyers into the journey, while the product is still being designed to get buy-in from that, all of that changes as soon as you now have the superpower to commercialize a product from a visual aspect, from a sales and e-com aspect much before the product is ever validated and finalized. That way you can flip the script and really go to market with only the heavy hitters so that every product that you're trying to take to market is backed by customer validation.

(21:28):

Experience visual assets that not only helps you make better decisions and get closer to taking only heavy hitters to market, but also helps you convert more because you think of it as a brand and you are selling something through a retailer and the retailer gets all your commercial assets ready to go on the first day. That is a rarity. Every retailer tells us the brand doesn't give us enough content, and every brand tells us we don't have the capacity to produce as much content. So that script can be flipped on its head. And we have a few customers that already do this, and they tell us that they're never going back to the old process of designing, designing, designing, taking to market and figuring and finding out what sells. Instead, they want to know what sells right from when the first design concept was created.

Peter Crosby (22:25):

Well, I can't let you go without hearing the examples because this is where the rubber meets the road. We all work in an industry where there's the sort of ideal life cycle of things, and then there's humanity and old tech and all that sort of stuff. So I'd love to hear a couple of examples if you have them about how these transformations are happening and to your point, what's the business value that they're driving once you see them get through the whole cycle?

Preet Singh (22:58):

Yeah. Okay. So I want you to imagine a really beautiful 104 inch leather sofa with the Chesterfield tufting in light tan color right now, all three of us on this call have an image in our head,

Peter Crosby (23:21):

Oh, I'm ready for my nap already. Yes, thank you.

Preet Singh (23:25):

But none of those images will match. If we were able to produce those project, those images onto a screen that we're seeing in our head, it's not going to match. And the reason it doesn't match is because we all think of design differently until we see it. When you look at CAD design, it was CAD originated from defense equipment and aerospace and automobile and ship building and energy, power grids where nobody cares about the aesthetic. The job of an aircraft is not to look beautiful, it's to fly people efficiently. So CAD traditionally is not made for aesthetic products. That is an afterthought inside of all CAD systems is, oh, we must introduce a render because people may want to see what color of green this is. So that, that's so cad. So rendering is an afterthought. Now, as examples from someone that we already do this with one of our customers, they used to go through this traditional process of iteration.

(24:35):

We got them their industrial design team to start using, imagine when he would import his concept, which was not fully baked into our platform, and then hit a button with had all their automation. So it would generate a PDP of a product that is currently only in design phase and is probably going to be out 18 months from now if it makes through the cycle. But you have all of the visual assets and a generated PDP ready to go for review. So now you are not reviewing shapes and colors, you are reviewing a fully baked experience of how this will look when it lists on Lowe's, how will it look when it lists on Wayfair, right? So you are experiencing that product as you would sell it 18 months from now. The conversation there completely changed because marketing was more involved, e-commerce was more involved.

(25:33):

They could really ask questions. They could really figure out this type of looking product, which price point will it work best for me? And so once you see it is that barrier of not seeing it and making decisions on it versus actually seeing it in action and then making decisions on it along with the brand guidelines and the story. When that started to happen, our customer created an advisory board with large retail buyers and wholesale buyers that he already did business with so that they could now be part of the design process and have a say right from the beginning. That completely changed because now the buyers that were going to make a decision at market or at a large event are now making decision all through the design process in guiding the retailer to what they need. That has really, really changed how some of our customers are now doing business that are brands because now they're, and with their buyers to take the product to market.

(26:47):

So it's intelligence collaborated from the brand and the retailer. That's really how we are seeing it change completely. And then by the time the product is ready to sell and they have inventory that they can ship, they're not waiting for content. Content was done eight months before that, so the pages are ready to go. So time to market also got reduced, and on average they saw that they were able to launch collections about two and a half months early each season. So think of it as like six months in a year versus that first year you get eight and a half months

Lauren Livak Gilbert (27:31):

And Preet can you also use it for planogramming and kind of seeing what the item could look like in store. You shared an example about that. Can you talk about that? Because I think that is impactful as we're talking about creating products for in-store and online.

Preet Singh (27:46):

Absolutely. Now this is interesting. So think of a eight pack of a pack of six for beer or a pack of four or a single can. Planogramming is so important. Most companies will need to show it to a retailer, seek approval, and then once the approval is there, then they can go and get the product placed. Now, every year you're launching new collections or new flavors. You have a Halloween pack, you have a summer collection, you have constant have products coming out, and they constantly need approval. So what we see with retail marketing teams is again, they bring their existing CAD data and their print packaging files directly into our software, and then they're able to say, I want to see it in a layout of this rack in a Walmart like store, in a Home Depot like store. And based on that Planogramming rules, all of that content is generated, and those images are then taken further by the sales team, by the retail marketing team to seek approvals from different retailers as well as different gas stations and medical stores and things like that. So that entire pipeline, because we are reusing the CAD data, we all the digital twin that we generated that now not only serves e-comm and marketing, but also serves physical planogramming, digital shelf, all of the different places where that product needs to go.

Peter Crosby (29:19):

I mean, it really is in an era that we're in where incremental growth is going to come from just a few places. And usually it's because you're able to do something faster, better, stronger than your competitors. It's stealing market share as opposed to the world you sell to getting larger necessarily. And so when you think of that, all of these, this appears to me all of these games that you're talking about at various stages and the collaboration that it can drive just ups your chance of being faster, better, stronger, which seems like a good idea to me.

Preet Singh (30:03):

Yeah, faster, better. And also what we see is remember in the beginning of the conversation we talked about the relationship between quantity and quality of images being directly proportionate to conversion. Now with a digital asset, production of additional content or just more content per product is much easier and more cost effective instead of having to go and do five extra photos per product in the studio. So it's just more cost effective, it's easier to iterate with, and it helps you with more conversion because it gives the buyer confidence that this brand or this product isn't hiding anything from me. They're showing me closeups of the material. They're showing me 360, I can place it in my home and see how big it is. As you do that, conversion also rises, right? So you're not on one side, you're saving the money and time and going to market faster. And on the other side, you're able to just convert a lot more than your competition.

Peter Crosby (31:13):

And those are the exciting opportunities to come as we move through this next era. And so pret, I just want to thank you so much for coming and expanding our understanding of what's possible. It became a much different conversation than I was expecting to be honest with you, because so often the conversation around imagery is restricted within a set of teams that are sort of later in the process, but expanding that just seems to make so much sense for a lot of reasons outside of what I was expecting. And thank you for illuminating my brain and hopefully that of our audience. We really appreciate being here.

Preet Singh (31:51):

Hey, thank you for having me. Appreciate the time and great conversation.

Peter Crosby (31:54):

Thanks again, Preet for bringing his fantastic nerdiness to the podcast. So often it's our organizations, not our technology that either delays or propels change. So now is the time for you to download Lauren's latest report, reinventing the Organization for omnichannel success at digitalshelfinstitute.org/omni. You'll be glad you did. Thanks for being part of our community.