Deliver immersive retail experiences at scale for a more sustainable future

A staggering 83% of consumers believe businesses should actively be shaping their best practices around environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues, as based on a 2021 Corporate Social Responsibility Survey. Retailers are getting serious about slowing the effects of climate change by reducing their carbon footprints. Many are committed to net-zero emissions targets within the next several years. However, with consumers increasingly shopping online, extra packaging, fulfillment, and transportation are all increasing emissions.

Creating and selling a product is a long, complicated chain of transactions. Each one contributes to greenhouse gas emissions (i.e., samples, design changes, product photography, and returns). A notable contributor to emissions is the production of visual assets that power the customer experience for retail and consumer packaged goods (i.e., T&E for models & photographers, shipping, and disposal). Moreover, many consumer brands are unable to see an obvious link between them. What if products didn’t need to be shipped, dressed, paired with models, and photographed/retouched? Furthermore, what if conversion rates could be increased by 70% or more, and returns reduced by up to 40% with 3D visualization? Addressing this issue can feel (and is) daunting, particularly for smaller companies, but the first step is clear.

To help solve these problems, we turned to our 3D commerce/Augmented Reality (AR) expert and AWS Partner, Hexa. Hexa offers retailers 3D asset pipelines and AR features that provide consumers with a virtual and immersive try-before-you-buy interaction designed to enhance the online shopping experience. Immersive online shopping experiences can boost consumer confidence and increase retailer conversion rate, thereby increasing revenue. But it also lets brands and retailers achieve their sustainability goals by reducing returns and cutting out the unnecessary impact of physical product marketing.

Hexa works with companies around the globe to deliver elevated experiences that are more sustainable for the future. One of these partners is Emperia. Emperia develops immersive virtual stores for the fashion and retail sectors, boosting sales, customer engagement, and brand perception. The company is building ecommerce’s new technology frontier, highly differentiated virtual experiences which extend brands’ physical spaces into the virtual realm and the metaverse, adding a layer of interaction, personalization, data monitoring, and omnichannel cohesion. According Olga Dogadkina, co-founder and CEO at Emperia, “This past year, we’ve seen a significant surge in demand for virtual stores, mainly stemming from retailers’ notion that virtual stores should become an integral, permanent part of their ecommerce strategy and witnessing the migration of shoppers to this new type of online commerce. Immersive virtual stores present two benefits, on one hand they tell a true brand story, adding a dimension of realism, through 3D space and product design, on top of gaming and other interactive elements, which increases both engagement and revenues. On the other hand, it solves a major retail industry issue – return rate. By being able to view product detail in 3D and virtually try them on, our clients are seeing a significant decrease in returns.”

Hexa’s ability to efficiently and cost-effectively create 3D representations of retail products and synthetic content creation at scale opens up new capabilities for retail and CPG companies. This offers brands new levels of flexibility and ways to reduce the waste associated with real-life photoshoots. Now, retailers can replace products, change colors and configurations, and swap out entire item sets with the click of a button. Hexa enables consumer brands to further reduce their carbon footprint associated with transporting teams and materials without any additional construction and consumables.

Hexa delivers an immersive operating system for retail/CPG customers with a comprehensive 3D tech stack. This enables brands to create, manage, display, and analyze 3D projects by taking just a few existing images and transforming them into high-fidelity 3D models. Hexa uses AWS cloud-based solutions to turn nearly any image into a 3D model. Then, these can be layered onto a real-world environment (in the case of AR), or viewed in 360-degrees on product pages to give consumers a better feel for the product’s attributes. Hexa’s powerful infrastructure supports the data levels that brands need to create and distribute these models, 360-degree experiences, and AR at scale without sacrificing quality.

Hexa’s sustainability-fist approach helps customers increase market share and sales, lower customer acquisition costs and visualization expenses, and reduce returns. Furthermore, all of this is accomplished while reducing environmental impact. And this industry-first capability is achieved by leveraging synthetic visual content, such as 3D models, product photos, and marketing backplates, to create production-quality 2D images and videos for marketing and advertising with ease

Hexa recently introduced new capabilities that use graphics processing units (GPUs) to reduce CO2 at scale, thereby democratizing the creation of green visual assets with the click of a button. Hexa lets customers create and continually extract value from their visual assets by repurposing them for easy distribution across almost any application, online destination, metaverse, or social platform.

AWS offers on-demand G5 GPU instances and AWS Thinkbox Deadline for visualization as affordable and durable storage options. It also offers Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for asset management, which enables Hexa’s platform to reduce the need for retailers to compromise between brand equity and sustainability.

Today’s consumers are demanding Ethical Commerce and truly sustainable brands. The combination of Hexa’s functionality and the power of AWS means that technology can help brands meet these demands and gain a competitive advantage.

Hexa’s 3D Augmented reality (AR) Content Creation solution is now available in AWS Marketplace.

AWS Partner Spotlight

Hexa is a 3D visualization platform that uses AI to create 3D assets and lowers the amount of time, money and set of skills needed, by converting any image into a 3D model cost effectively to better showcase products online. Hexa helps retail and CPG brands elevate their eCommerce experience with a 3D tech stack that allows brands to create, manage, analyze, and distribute 3D commerce assets.

Connect with Hexa today.