Latest / Talk Commerce / From Photo Shoots to Pixels Revolutionizing Retail Visual Merchandising with Mark Elfenbein
Transcript
- Brent (00:01.132) Welcome to this episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Mark Elfenbein. He is the CRO with Infinite. Mark, I hope I got your last name right that time. Go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions. Mark (00:10.694) the difference. Mark (00:15.62) Yeah, so I head up the North American business for Infinite. And Infinite is the largest global provider of AI and CGI visual merchandising for enterprise retailers and brands. I guess just separate from that, I'm a big fan of ice hockey as a Canadian, also a sushi enthusiast. Brent (00:37.528) That's awesome. And you live in Minneapolis, so you can't get away from ice hockey and Minneapolis, St. Paul. But for everybody that really wants to know more, the most rinks per capita of any place in the world. And it outranks even any Canadian city by 10 times. If you look it up, even St. Louis Park where I'm at right now has as a rink in every single park. So definitely ice ice is a place. Mark (00:59.44) And I think it's very critical because when it's, yeah, when you're running around as a kid outside and it's negative 20, you really need those ice rinks to kill a couple, a few hours. Brent (01:09.234) Exactly. All right, Mark. Mark, tell us a little bit about your background and sort of give us an introduction to Infinite and what you guys do. Mark (01:17.264) Well, I've had a pretty interesting background. My family actually started a large music company in Canada that was called KTEL, which became the largest provider of music compilations in the world. So I had a kind of this music industry background, you know, way back when, but then became very entrepreneurial in different kinds of startups, a lot in the AI and kind of image recognition space. I was CEO and founder of a company called Slice. that went public that was allowing you to take pictures of things you see in the real world and buy it kind of like a Shazam for visual and spent a lot of time in the AI and kind of AI for shopping space with a lot of startups, raising a lot of financing, leading to my company today, Infinite, which has raised over $100 million of financing and works with some of the biggest retailers on the planet like Amazon and Walmart Canada and Costco and Lowe's. Brent (02:10.382) So we were, we are going to talk specifically about visual merchandising in the retail space. So tell us a little bit about the introduction to that to people like Costco and Lowe's and how that's helping. Mark (02:22.606) Yeah, so if you can imagine historically, if you wanted to put pictures of products online as you're selling things, you know, go back five, 10 years ago, you'd have to do a traditional studio photography shoot. And that requires a lot of cost. coordination, resources. Typically, we hear the cost of that could be tens of thousands of dollars. For example, if your home depot are low and you have many items like, you know, fridge, arrange, lighting, you want to put into one scene, we're talking, know, $30,000 to pull off that one scene. Now, a CGI or AI, you can wipe out 80 to 90 % of that cost. And then your time to market is a fraction. of the time it would take to coordinate that kind of an effort. So you can see there's just a huge scalability opportunity now with providing dramatic and kind of avatar level product images and lifestyle scenes to help the shopping experience. Brent (03:16.27) Do you think that, I mean, that doesn't just help the merchant, it helps the consumer because you can do it at scale. You can get, I think in your show notes, photo shoots to pixels where you're just being able, you're able to create much more content for the user, but even based on a stock shot, right? From of that actual piece, then making it to different pieces. Mark (03:35.532) That's right. And we don't eat a lot. if you can go, if you're a brand or retailer, you can walk onto your showroom floor, take some iPhone pictures, take a couple of them, send it to us. We then will build a digital twin of that item. So think of that going instantly into the metaverse. Now that item is redeployable into any environment, know, an infinite amount of times for any kind of setting, for personalization, any time of the year. It's not like you take a picture of something and it's a one and done. Now you have kind of the world of digital after this point to redeploy this product. which is very interesting to lot of these brands. From a customer perspective, they now have a lot more confidence on a product. Imagine if you could see an item in a 360 view or using AR, you can articulate this item, zoom into any specific shot. Customers like Foot Locker, for example, have shoes and they want to show that view from all angles up and below. zoom in and they also want to be able to show it not just in the primary color but in 15 variant colors where otherwise that wouldn't be feasible. Brent (04:45.806) Yeah, I think one of the things, the variance in catalogs on how AI has helped consumers, most people think that maybe the text area, the content area is really where AI leans in, but images and even video now have become more important for consumers when they're purchasing. Talk a little bit about how those pieces of images and how the licensing More importantly, the licensing part of that is still maintained by the merchant. Mark (05:20.464) Yeah, so if you imagine if you're selling, there's two kinds of products of a brand or retailer or reseller. They're selling their own proprietary items called the private label products, which is a big trend, or they're reselling national brands. Either case, there's kind of, there's a problem when they're selling national brands or having to rely on other suppliers, those suppliers may provide very shoddy imagery, maybe one or two pictures. The retailers have determined, we need at least seven images to increase the customer confidence to the point where we can max out on that opportunity and also give the customer enough information so they're confident to make the purchase. In the case of private label, they don't have any content. They have to go now and do a photo shoot. You can imagine if you are producing private label furniture like Walmart, Canada. they're selling furniture, they have their private label brands, but now they're responsible for all the visual asset creation and it's kind of out of their domain. They need a company like that's involved with CGI and AI like Infinite that can come in and kind of just, you know, accelerate this whole process, automate it, and bring all these products to market very quickly. Brent (06:30.698) the idea of endless aisles has been, has been around for a while, but now this gives the ability to do an endless aisle with visuals at scale, right? Talk a little bit about, I know that in your show notes, you had mentioned Lowe's and some of these other bigger retailers that have really had a lot of success by employing some of the things that you're doing. Mark (06:53.062) Yeah. And I think one of the challenges is okay, if you're a retailer, maybe you sell a couple hundred SKUs of something, not that big of an issue. If you're a Lowe's, you're into the millions of SKUs and products. If you're Wayfair, you're in the tens of millions of products. And there's no possible scalable way that you could provide all the immersive imagery for 20 million products across, you know, close-up shots, 360s, AR, lifestyle scenes. It would cost, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars to do it traditionally. Now though, with using AI, you can just automate 30 instant variations. You can address hundreds of thousands of products or millions of products to give really a consistent shopping experience across all products, as opposed to something that was more disenfranchised. I'm going to one page, I see one image. I go to another page, there's maybe six or seven images. but it's a very shoddy customer experience. Now you can have a very consistent shopping experience across your whole catalog and also bring in your brand identity. So it's also about, what are my brand preferences? The brand preferences of a high-end fashion brand might be different than a big price club. It might be different than a food retailer, as an example. But all those are implemented into the outputs to create that consistency. Brent (08:15.722) Is there a magic number that a retailer should look for when having images on a product on a PDP page? Mark (08:23.59) Yeah, and so we work with the BayMart Institute, which actually does a lot of research in this category and says that you really need probably around 10 or so immersive visuals per product to max out the opportunity to give enough information to the customer. The other interesting thing is that this also helps with product returns, if you could believe it. If I don't have enough information, I might be buying a sofa that's too big for my room or something that's too small or it didn't kind of fit the way I wanted it to. returns are very high. If you can provide more of this data, the ability to really look around a product, see that product in context, see it in your own room, maybe also just zoom in and move it around in real time, you're kind of sufficiently eliminating the chances for return or confusion. And then you're giving that confidence to the customer that say, you know what, I know enough about this product to know it's going to work for me. And we're seeing significant, you know, add to cart and conversion rates increases. depending on the type of visual immersive unit that you're deploying onto your product detail pages. Brent (09:38.03) One of the things that you had mentioned earlier... Brent (09:46.318) Sorry, go ahead. Mark (09:48.24) I wasn't saying anything. Brent (09:52.59) I'm gonna put it into low data mode, because we're getting a little bit of choppiness now. Let's see. is low data mode they moved it on me. Brent (10:09.806) All right, let's try this now. Okay, so one of the things you had mentioned earlier is the ability to go in and take a few pictures and then come up with a lot of different ones. But that also gives you the ability to do 3D, right? To talk about how 3D and the 360 views and even the future of now augmented reality is going to play into AI and how it's letting the merchant be more flexible in how much they have to do pictures. Mark (10:40.836) Yeah, so I think one of the great successes that we have is working with very limited amounts of content or distressed visual content. So in a lot of times, the brands and retailers just don't have access to enough images to really merchandise the product. If we have a couple images of a product, we are able to build what we call a 3D model or we interchangeably use the term of a digital twin there in that case. Once we can build this digital twin of the product, then all of the visual assets are automatically deployed by us. So typically what we deploy are going to be all of the pack shots or closeups. We're also deploying very interesting, all these lifestyle scenes. So if you imagine, say you have a sofa and you want to see it in not just one living room, maybe five or 10 living rooms, depending on what is kind of, you know, relates to you, where you live. And once you can see it in kind of something relatable to your environment, it really resonates with you. Additionally, we found a very interesting unit is the 360 kind of view of a product where a product is spinning. So imagine a very high-end handbag or a nice pair of shoes or even a piece of furniture. I think when you can see all angles of it, see how the light shines off of it, I think that just gives you a very much higher perceived value of the product. You're much more likely to acquire it. And then the other area that we see a lot of traction is through AR. So AR allows the customer to see this product more in a 3D experience, where you now can move the product and look around it, zoom into what you want to zoom into, and then have the full immersive, almost the in-store experience, but through the e-commerce lens. And once we allow that type of immersive experience, there is very significant impact. Mark (12:34.862) to the customer's comfort level in completing that acquisition of the product. And we're seeing big performance jumps. as we're introducing more of an AR experience. And that's going to be the bar moving forward, where back in the day you may have had one image. Now it's going to be, hey, I need to have video, which we haven't talked about yet, which is also very interesting, and an AR experience. So that bar is being set. And the customers are expecting a lot more before they make a purchase. Brent (13:09.958) you did. So yeah, let's talk about video now. is it, people making videos from static images already? Is that, is that going to be happening now? Mark (13:20.73) Yeah, and so we were able to do a full motion AI and CGI video from images. So if you want to see kind of an installation video, you know, hey, here's a product. I want to see it kind of how it unpacks. I want to see how it gets put together. Now you can do all this through CGI or AI as opposed to doing a traditional video shoot. So there's many kinds of use cases for video, including maybe just doing call outs of the product. know, features, showing how it opens and closes, showing how you build it. All of these are necessary now to go on these purchasing pages for shoppers. Brent (14:02.892) Are you seeing this then enabling the marketers to be more efficient and the retailers to increase the or decrease the timeline it takes to get a product to market? Mark (14:14.342) Yeah, so typically if you can imagine you have to storyboard this you have to bring in crews It's probably three to six months through historical means to do a single video Now this can be done in a matter of days or maybe even less time So just the speed to market is important a lot of these retailers too They may only have a product in stock for a week They need to get this merchandise very quickly in and out it sells out there onto the next product Historically, you can never do it through traditional photography. This allows a lot more real time and almost fast fashion merchandising of any type of product. Brent (14:55.63) How about from the manufacturer supplier side? Is there a benefit to them to get these products into a retailer and have those images already created? Mark (15:06.372) Yeah, so a lot of the manufacturers are seeing now that there's kind of a minimum content they need to supply to a big marketplace like Wayfair or Overstock just to get their products merchandise. There could be a minimum five to seven visuals that they need and they can't produce it themselves. So a lot of our customers who are the manufacturers use us to build these visuals so they can deploy them to their different retail channels. Brent (15:32.366) What are you seeing the biggest success with in between visual, between images, between video and between content by deploying AI for the merchants and the suppliers? Mark (15:49.936) Well, really there's a lot of big benefits. think that one of the number one benefits is just the cost factor. So if you want to be able to reasonably merchandise all your products, you're wiping out a huge amount of cost and you really don't have to worry about that anymore. We're seeing a really big speed to market benefit where you now can be in market within days where as what would have taken you months to provide kind of a merchandising system. We're also seeing that you can now merchandise substantially all the variants of our products. For example, couches can come in 30 or 40 colors. Previously, a shopper couldn't even see how these colors looked like across all these different visual assets. Now this is instantly deployable with the infinite AI platform. So there's kind of six to seven very significant benefits that are anywhere from cost savings, to providing enough information so we can now convert the shopper to also eliminating product returns and then just overall speed to market as now we're living in a world where products are changing a lot more frequently as opposed to sitting someplace for six months. Brent (17:08.802) That's perfect, Mark. This has really been an enjoyable conversation. The time is going by quickly. As I close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today? Mark (17:20.464) Well, I think in our case, we're really built for scale, infinite. And we service enterprise retailers that otherwise didn't really know that you can use now a combination of AI and CGI to merchandise your product. So if you're a brand or retailer and you're having a difficult time providing all this content, we're a great one-stop solution for you. Brent (17:47.192) That's perfect. Mark Elfenbein, Elfenbein with Infinite, the Sierra for Infinite. Thank you so much for being here today.