This post covers how 3D rendering helps when marketing your furniture company. Introducing any new product to today’s saturated market is difficult, especially for furniture companies, because they must communicate a product’s values, features, and functions. A chair is for seating, a cabinet is for storage, a desk is where you put a computer, and the stationery goes into the drawer. However, furniture often does much more than what it is intended for. Furniture is made with intricate details, both functional and decorative. When crafted from heavy-duty or exotic materials, furniture can be the centerpiece of an interior or an investment.
Table of Contents
- 17 Ways How 3D rendering helps when marketing your furniture company
- Realistic product images without a photographer
- 3D Rendering is perfect for product websites
- Blogs and social media
- Fresh click-inviting newsletter
- Promotional aspect categorization
- Flexible presentations
- Product detailed specification
- Multiple product design concepts
- Real-life scenes on a budget
- Short preparation time
- Season-appropriate design
- Lower marketing costs
- Quick digital alterations
- Catering to different markets
- Interactivity
- Creativity-inducing format
- Unlimited furniture design creations
- How Cad Crowd can assist
RELATED: How to get the best 3D rendering services for furniture design
17 Ways How 3D rendering helps when marketing your furniture company
It takes an innovative advertising technique to deliver the correct message about what furniture can do and how it may improve life beyond the typical function. Taking hints from IKEA’s marketing strategy, furniture companies have started to understand the value of investing in the expertise of a 3D furniture rendering company and that it is the best way to promote new products and engage customers. 3D rendering is converting a three-dimensional model (3D model) of an object into a two-dimensional (2D model) format. All rendered images start as 3D models created using computer-aided design (CAD) software.
A 3D model is a technical drawing of an object’s shape in its original form. The shape is easy to recognize, but the image is plain and unsuitable for advertising. Rendering completes the missing elements such as color, texture, pattern, lighting, and shadows. A rendering process by a skillful artist produces photorealistic computer graphic imagery (CGI). 3D rendering can help with marketing in many ways for companies that make or sell furniture.
RELATED: 3D rendering furniture vs. photography: which is better for your furniture company?
Realistic product images without a photographer
When making a printed or digital catalog, chances are you need a professional photographer to prepare the product images. You may also need a photo studio to obtain good-quality promotional pictures. The problem is that the catalog requires regular updates, and you must hire a photographer again as soon as the product list changes. It is not a one-time expense and hurts the profit margin each time. Unlike photography, a 3D model can be rendered multiple times under different settings to reproduce unique images every single time.
There is no need for a myriad of lighting equipment, decorations, additional items, and room layouts to create any product image. You don’t need physical products because everything is done on the computer. One of the most significant advantages of 3D furniture modeling services compared with conventional photography is that it doesn’t take a photographer and a studio to create product images. Your company can use 3D rendering to create realistic product images without using a photographer. Powerful CAD software and a freelance 3D rendering artist are all you need.
RELATED: Furniture marketing services: 12 reasons why companies choose 3D CGI over photography
3D Rendering is perfect for product websites
Product photos on a furniture website are a great tool to convince customers. However, capturing furniture from multiple angles within various interior design locations with the perfect lighting conditions is costly. 3D rendering is the next best thing to traditional photography. Detailed furniture renders can show the furniture’s appearance when placed in multiple environments. You can choose parts of the furniture to highlight the intensity and source of the light. A render artist will ensure that all the dimensions are accurate and the view is as close as possible to being realistic. Moreover, you can provide an interactive platform for visitors to rotate and have a 360-degree view of the image.
Business websites are primarily static because the content does not change much over the years. Familiarity and consistency are essential, which means frequent changes are not advisable. You don’t want customers to revisit your furniture website and get confused with different menus and layouts; this is where a blog comes in. Blogs allow companies to post fresh content, including images, without altering the website’s design.
RELATED: 27 Ways digital product rendering can help furniture manufacturers with marketing
The website can focus on your current furniture lineup, and the blog can emphasize concepts, articles, industry news, design-related information, and portfolio updates. In addition to driving traffic to the main website, a blog is an excellent platform to communicate directly with customers through comments. 3D furniture rendering is required to ensure the blog and website have equal content quality. You can communicate ideas and share your insights thanks to photorealistic rendering designers and the detail that 3D rendering achieves.
The same thing applies to social media. Social websites like Instagram focus heavily on multimedia content, making it an ideal space for furniture companies to promote products and engage in customer interaction. Social media makes it easy for anyone to share images and send the links to friends and families, who may also find your products appealing. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok, and LinkedIn are powerful channels to consider posting your best 3D rendered furniture images.
RELATED: Augmented reality: a great marketing tool for furniture industry companies
Let us not forget the newsletter, the old, tried-and-true Internet-based marketing effort. Every company wants to stay relevant in the customers’ minds looking for enticing ideas to grab customer attention. Instead of using words to tell customers about your new offerings and updated catalog, spare some space to attach 3D rendered images. Image placement can be at the top or middle of the email, and fresh imagery is crucial to keep subscribers engaged. An attractive image encourages subscribers to click the link and land on your website.
Promotional aspect categorization
There are three basic types of 3D furniture rendering:
- Exclusive Visage: the focus is on the appearance of a specific product. Advertised furniture is depicted in front of plain black or white background.
- Lifestyle Model: the interior 3D rendering expert create designs that showcases products in an interior space with positional arrangements, dimensions, lighting, and colors that accurately represent various settings.
- Product Associate: a scene that features furniture accompanied by complementary items, positioned in such a way as to highlight the main products.
The whole point of the categorization is to offer advertising variety in uniformity. The main furniture products may be the same in all three types, but different renders widen the potential customer base. A lifestyle model may trigger a response even if someone is not impressed with an exclusive visage.
RELATED: How does 3D animation help furniture manufacturing companies boost new product sales?
Flexible presentations
Every single piece of furniture can have ten or more design options. A 3D designer (3D furniture designer) can start with a natural wooden chair design, and the rendering process results in various iterations. With 3D furniture rendering, the 3D furniture designer can present numerous colors, materials, upholstery, patterns, detailing, finishes, and fastening.
Since the visualization is done in a CGI environment, experiments with physical products are unnecessary. Suddenly, your company has possible production models despite spending no money on prototypes. Rendered images also are ready-to-use advertising materials. You can post them on websites and social media and immediately start a marketing campaign for a product that is not yet manufactured. It is marketing without rushing to push new products out of the production line.
RELATED: Beautiful 3D CAD designs in these furniture design contests
Product detailed specification
Adding informative content to the rendered images can also turn the advertising materials into clear manufacturing plans. 3D furniture rendering allows for concise information such as dimensions and types of material, and an overview of the furniture gives a detailed product specification. In addition to describing every part of the furniture, the perceived message is that your company can assemble those parts into a fully functioning product. Furniture is not the most complex object to assemble, but at least the target audience is convinced of your technical proficiency. As a bonus, the production team can use the 3D model design of the 3D rendering studio to discover what designers need and desire.
Multiple product design concepts
Lifestyle models of furniture rendering can help expand your customers’ vision of the products. Furniture is put into a thematic environment to trigger an emotional response and encourage the audience to dig deeper into the product’s value and purpose. Customers will see how the furniture looks in various interior designs, such as minimalistic, rustic, industrial, contemporary, and classic, from particular time frames. Having options affects purchasing decisions. Having options affects purchasing decisions; no matter what concept or design you need, a 3D rendering designer can help create it.
RELATED: 19 Ways 3D product rendering is used by furniture companies to fuel sales growth
Real-life scenes on a budget
A professional, experienced photographer with the right set of equipment can capture excellent product images to depict real-life scenes, given the time and budget. To produce a single image with all the proper lighting and weather conditions may require hauling an entire crew with camera gear out to create one scene. And a perfect backdrop doesn’t always arrive at the right moment. Furthermore, the final image only offers so much in terms of modification (photo manipulation). You must build multiple sets to obtain a reasonable number of photos good enough to use as marketing materials.
The 3D furniture rendering process removes all those hassles. It doesn’t even have to wait for nature to provide the right intensity of sunlight, shade, and weather. Every tiny detail of a scene is computer-generated. A 3D architectural visualization artist can change the light source, increase or reduce light intensity, and alter the direction of sun rays, wind speed, water reflection, surface deflection, and shadows. Because 3D furniture rendering does not depend on external and often unpredictable factors, depicting real-life scenes is much quicker than photography. Depending on the rendering studio tasked with the job, you can get dozens of 3D furniture renderings—each painting a different picture—in a couple of weeks or so. As a result, you display the products more quickly than your photography-based competitors.
RELATED: Furniture catalog: top 5 ways that 3D product rendering can help your sales
Short preparation time
A 3D rendering professional needs only technical drawings and style preferences to produce a photorealistic image, and detailed instructions allow them to deliver an unmatched level of realism. Depending on the project’s complexity, it takes a few hours to several weeks to create high-quality 3D rendering. That said, it is still much quicker than what traditional photography would take to come up with equally good results. 3D furniture rendering ensures you get campaign-ready furniture images quickly or at least avoid any pushback from the scheduled timeline. It is useful when you aim to outpace competitors during seasonal and other time-sensitive marketing campaigns.
Season-appropriate design
Thanks to 3D rendering, giving your catalog a seasonal makeover is not at all a cumbersome process. With every change in season and holiday, customers look for new trends, up-to-date designs, and fresh styles. The conventional means of producing marketing materials is hardly sustainable, especially for small companies, and it is too expensive and time-consuming. A 3D CAD drafting & drawing company can use your existing technical drawings or 3D models and recreate new scenes appropriate to the current marketing subject. If the rendering features natural elements like flowers, leaves, and calm decorations in the spring, it only makes sense to replace them with snow and a glowing furnace in the winter. Color schemes may range from warm tones to freezing white. All that work involves no photographer at all. As long as you have the base 3D models of the furniture, rendering tackles the rest of the process.
RELATED: Types of 3D furniture design and CGI rendering services used by manufacturers
Lower marketing costs
Nothing shown in a 3D rendering of furniture needs to exist in real life. The furniture, or rather a picture of it, starts as a digital object drawn on a computer. Then clever photo manipulation techniques transform the base model into a realistic-looking image. A significant upside of the method is the absence of physical products, and you can create a photo album without having the object in the first place. Rendering requires no product prototype so you can save money on marketing.
Your furniture company can now spend the saved budget and time to focus on marketing efforts. If previously the campaign was done through social media and online platforms, now it can afford the more expensive and effective promotion methods, for example, TV ads on popular shows and product demonstrations at public venues.
RELATED: How CGI can help marketing for your furniture business
Quick digital alterations
If the 3D furniture rendering misses essential points, a 3D artist can implement changes quickly. There will be situations where product designers want to make a few alterations to the existing promotional materials just days before the marketing campaign launch. 3D rendering makes it easier to add additional shots from different angles, give final touches, change colors, or remove complementary objects from the scene.
The ease of modification makes 3D furniture rendering an ideal form of furniture imagery. A 3D model can be the foundation for hundreds of unique renders to fit marketing ideas. And the best part is the low-cost production budget. It is much cheaper to invest in a 3D design professional to create a 3D rendering than to build a whole new photo set each time you need a new image. A new render doesn’t happen instantly, but the process is not as long and expensive as preparing new promotional photographs.
RELATED: Why IKEA uses 3D renders vs. photography for their furniture catalog
Catering to different markets
One-size-fits-all doesn’t work as a furniture marketing approach, even more so when you want to sell the products to a vast target market. A different customer group within a specific demographic can have an entirely conflicting idea of what furniture should be. For example, the middle-aged working class may want their furniture to be simple, practical, and understated.
In contrast, the fashionable young group will find that elaborate, modern, and colorful items are more appealing. You have no option but to adjust the catalog to cater to different markets. 3D rendering allows limitless adjustments to details without changing the specification of the furniture. Small changes in colors, upholstery and finishes can work wonders to boost your products’ appeal to multiple target markets.
RELATED: How 3D furniture modeling can drive your new product revenue
Interactivity
The discussion about 3D rendering has revolved around the still-image format. However, with the help of modern CAD software, the 3D animation services can create an animated rendering. It is not just a product image that you can rotate and zoom, but one that comes with pop-up information. For instance, a rendered image of a chair might have some clickable spots in essential parts to reveal the material, dimension, maximum weight, an extra stool underneath, style, and specifications. Click on the armrest, and the page shows a text to describe what it is made of and how it is manufactured; if it is the cushion, the pop-up says something about its thickness and durability.
Think of it as an exploded view of furniture in 3D, displaying the product part by part and layer by layer. Interactivity does not affect the level of detail. If anything, clickable arrows or dots encourage the audience to explore more about the furniture. The only downside is that interactivity only works on online platforms. For print media, the images are usually screenshots of the interactive render.
RELATED: Increasing your eCommerce sales with 3D visualizers
Creativity-inducing format
One of the most overlooked advantages of 3D modeling and the subsequent 3D rendering method for marketing is their effect on designers’ creativity. Instead of spending a lot of time and money buying materials, paint, tools, and rapid prototyping services, designers can build anything imaginable using a computer. It does require CAD software (some are free) and a learning process to master the interface. Creative teams will be able to explore new design approaches and product concepts for many years to come without additional expense.
With endless product variations at their fingertips, designers can come up with new ideas on the fly. Over time they may be able to produce not only best-selling furniture but their marketing materials. Until they can master the software, rendering is a job that is best left to professionals, whether by hiring a 3D furniture rendering company or 3D modeling freelancers.
RELATED: How photorealistic 3D rendering design saves companies money
Unlimited furniture design creations
Although photography can produce an excellent furniture catalog, 3D rendering is ahead in creativity, completion time, flexibility, and affordability. Given the right CAD software, the only limit is the designers’ imagination. The ability to create something out of literally nothing is every designer’s dream. The simple fact is that 3D rendering can produce an impressive level of realism that surpasses the lifelikeness of photography. It is astounding to see that a computer-generated image turns out to be more convincing than an actual photograph.
IKEA has been at the forefront of the utilization of 3D rendering in furniture marketing. They have mastered the art to the point where hardly anybody realizes that more than 75 percent of the images in their catalog are 3D renders. The cost of 3D rendering services, and 3D furniture renderings, has become competitive over the years, so small furniture companies and marketers continue to see it as a better alternative to photography.
RELATED: How 3D rendering has revolutionized interior design
3D models are a valuable asset as the 3D modeler (3D furniture designer) can render the objects repeatedly with different settings to produce unique images – producing unlimited furniture design creations. For those working in the furniture industry, 3D rendering is a fast lane to improve creativity, marketing efficiency, and profitability. It is worth looking into hiring a freelance 3D furniture design services company to create 3D furniture designs for your company.
How Cad Crowd can assist
Whether you are a small business or working in a large company, Cad Crowd can assist in connecting you with one of our vetted designers for a variety of 3D rendering projects! Tell us your budget, and a few details of what you are hoping to achieve and we’ll handle the rest. Get a free quote today!