SmartPixels and Camille Fournet cooperated hand in hand to bring to life a digital configuration solution that delivers a unique customer experience, enhancing the company’s values.
Founded in 1945, Camille Fournet is worldwide recognized for its exceptional watch straps and its expertise in noble leathers. Today, the company creates contemporary, made-to-measure leather goods in its ateliers in France.
The brand, characterized by exceptional savoir-faire, has been approaching luxury in innovative ways for several years now. Camille Fournet has a forward-looking vision of leather goods craftsmanship, which translates into the quest for immersive and tailored experiences for its audience.
Camille Fournet provides its client base with highly customizable watch straps “made-to-measure ”, which users can design according to their personal tastes. Embedded with thousands of product combinations, personalization’s possibilities are endless.
Challenges faced by Camille Fournet
Creating an e-commerce seamless personalization experience is a daunting task.
Camille Fournet had previously implemented a product configurator for its tailor-made offering. However, our client was looking for a sparkle of innovation in its current solution, to enhance the brand’s pioneering approach and savoir-faire.
Camille Fournet was already able to provide its shoppers with trillions of product combinations with its personalization offer in-store. However, it seems clear how complicated it could have been to visually display every single possibility through traditional photography.
The brand intended to make it easier to present to its customers the full range of product customization possibilities, in a flawless, immersive, interactive, and ultra-realistic way.
Before reaching out to us, Camille Fournet was facing three main challenges:
• Making their made-to-measure offer as interactive, seamless, and smooth as possible
• Providing end clients with photorealistic visuals of products that have never existed before, leveraging 3D renderings. In this way, they could visualize their customized product in a 360° mode, and easily turn and zoom in and out to envisage/focus even (on) the tiniest of detail.
• Empowering users to personalize every detail of the watch strap in real-time, with the full range of available combinations at their disposal.
Our solution : An interactive 3D product configurator
Camille Fournet, conscious that 3D hyperrealistic renderings are critical to improving customers’ online experiences and increasing conversions and sales, decided to rely on SmartPixels’ expertise to launch their product personalization offer.
The cooperation between Camille Fournet and SmartPixels resulted in the creation of an interactive and engaging tailor-made 3D product configurator.
SmartPixels integrated the real-time product configurator on CF’s e-commerce platform, PrestaShop. Therefore, Camille Fournet’s end shoppers were able to instantaneously visualize and interact with photorealistic 3D visuals of their beloved watch straps.
Furthermore, the center of the experience was product personalization. Perhaps one might think that in a watch bracelet only color and material are customizable. Well, this is not the case for Camille Fournet’s watch straps.
Each bracelet is embedded with several elements, and each of them can be meticulously tailored:
• Measurement
• Buckle
• Material
• Edges
• Stitching
• Lining
• Tip
• Profile
• Lugs
• Keepers
• Holes
With our 3D product configurator, every single detail can be crafted according to the user’s preferences, resulting in trillions of product combinations in a few clicks.
Deep dive into the complexity of Camille Fournet’s project
Hear Julien Berta, CEO of SmartPixels, on the project
“What makes our job interesting is the need to immerse ourselves in the know-how of the brand. For example, in this case, it’s about understanding what makes a Camille Fournet watch strap so unique.
This requires visits to the manufacturer, in-store visits, but also a very deep understanding of the watchmaking world. There is a need to understand the complexity of a watch strap and its technical constraints. To illustrate, what are the constraints that the watch will impose on the watch strap? On the buckle? You can’t sew python, crocodile or rubber the same way. This creates an extremely vast universe of product configurations,” explains Julien, CEO of SmartPixels.
The Camille Fournet configurator is the one with the most extensive offering that SmartPixels has ever created. One of the complexities of the project lies in the ability to model all the existing variants. Indeed, this project has 2,645 thousand trillion possible combinations.
Once the products have been modelled, it is not a matter of presenting a list of billions of billion combinations of bracelets to the consumer and hoping that he will find the one he likes.
It is necessary to create a unique consumer experience, an experience guiding the consumer toward the bracelet that he desires. This means creating a fun, and engaging solution for the consumer while respecting the 7,274 rules of incompatibility and exclusion to ensure the manufacturability of the watch strap.
SmartPixels takes the time to deeply understand the complexity behind the creation process of the watch strap.
Our goal is to understand their constraints and encode them in a data model.
This will then allow us to ensure that the configurator only generates watch straps that Camille Fournet is capable of manufacturing. This is based on the 7274 business rules to be integrated into the product configurator but also on an abstract data model that describes the state of configuration of a watch strap and encodes the manufacturability of the watch strap.
This abstract language also allows us to:
• Interface with Camille Fournet’s ERP ‘Divalto’,
• To generate manufacturing files,
• To calculate in real-time the price of the products,
• To calculate the availability of stocks,
• To adjust the export possibilities in the case of countries with export restrictions for exotic skins.
This intangible, non-visual data becomes fundamental as soon as we start to control the transfer of information from the consumer to the craftsman, from order-taking to manufacturing. It is even more important as this data is managed through several channels since the configurator exists in the store, as well as on the e-commerce site.
The image generation engine can be used in all the channels where Camille Fournet needs a picture of its watch strap. It can be on the website, on social networks, or even in CRM campaigns…
