How Camille Fournet creates immersive shopping experiences

Camille Fournet, a Paris-based luxury leather goods maker founded in 1945, is not only renowned for their fine craftsmanship, but also their continued dedication to innovation beyond the workbench.

In luxury retail, customer experience and brand loyalty are as important as the products themselves. While an in-store shopping experience with Camille Fournet provides shoppers with a personalized experience, the ability to recreate this in an e-commerce environment is far more challenging.

Thanks to a real-time 3D product configurator built by SmartPixels and powered by Unity, Camille Fournet has maximized sales and consumer engagement, while reducing manufacturing costs, further demonstrating where the future of luxury shopping is heading.

Key results

• 5x increase in conversion from browsing to purchasing
• 66% increase in user engagement
• 252k images generated by customers every quarter

Translating in-store to online

In 2020, Camille Fournet embarked on a strategic development journey in order to create an enhanced digital experience for customers across their online, in-store, and B2B channels.

Their objectives were to:

• Increase brand awareness
• Improve revenue growth
• Enhance their consumer experience online

Central to this transformation was the launch of a project to conceptualize and implement a real-time 3D (RT3D) product configurator for their luxury leather watch straps.

Identifying business challenges

In order to achieve this transformation, Camille Fournet approached SmartPixels, specialists in creating photorealistic 3D renderings and 3D product configurators for luxury brands such as Globe-Trotter, Christian Louboutin, and Valentino.

While Camille Fournet already had a product configurator for its watch straps, it only consisted of static, 2D imagery, and didn’t effectively replicate the personalized in-store experience. With trillions of possible product combinations, traditional product photography methods would have been impossible from both a financial and a manufacturing standpoint. Additionally, the current configurator didn’t offer an interactive or seamless experience for online customers and they were were limited in their customization options.

The solution

The collaboration between Camille Fournet and SmartPixels resulted in the development of an interactive 3D product configurator that revolutionized the way customers engaged with the luxury leather watch straps.

The RT3D product configurator

The configurator was integrated into Camille Fournet’s e-commerce platform. It gives customers instant access to photorealistic 3D visuals of their desired watch straps and the ability to view these in 360-degree mode, providing a unique and engaging experience tailored to each customer’s preferences.

This configurator is the most complex one that SmartPixels has built to date. With an extensive offering boasting over trillions of possible combinations, the team also had to take into account 7,274 rules of incompatibility and exclusion in order to ensure that it was physically possible to manufacture each watch strap combination.

More than a visual tool

Aside from offering the customer a more immersive experience, the product configurator also provided an abstract data model that encoded the manufacturability of the watch strap. This data controlled the transfer of information throughout the customization process, enabling the real-time calculation of price, stock, and adjustment for export restrictions for the more exotic leathers.

Leveraging Unity for 3D renderings

SmartPixels harnessed the power of Unity to deliver highly detailed 3D renderings when building the complex configurator.

• Product data modeling: Using Camille Fournet’s internal format, Product Data Model (PDM), the product and all of its individual parts, components, materials and variants – and how they related to each part of the strap – were modeled.
• Unity setup: SmartPixels developed several Unity Editor extensions that ingested the Product Data Model to set up the Project, Scenes, and Variants.
• Asset creation: With the project data loaded into Unity, the team was able to design and model the 3D assets. They also digitized all of the various materials and created custom shaders for the more complex materials and exotic skins.
• Scene setup: SmartPixels created different scenes within Unity to represent various product configurations or environments. They set up lighting conditions that mimicked intended real-world scenarios for the product, and could arrange and position cameras in each scene to capture the optimal views for users interacting with the configurator.