Dassault Systèmes Taps into Retail and Consumer Markets with 3DVIA HomeByMe 3D Space Planning Solutions

3DVIA also gets a makeover.

Dassault Systèmes is all about the experience—hence calling itself the 3DEXPERIENCE company. Dassault has been working hard to extend that experience beyond the professional designer over the years to reach a broader market, including educators, consumers such as makers, and do-it-yourselfers.

One solution that recently caught our attention is Dassault Systemes’ HomeByMe for Home Retailers 3D home planning solution, powered by 3DVIA, but even more so the solution caught the attention of French furniture designer Gautier, which is using the solution to provide customers with personalized, in-store and online experiences, delivering collaborative engagement to drive customer satisfaction and sales.

Not only does Gautier design its home furniture; it also manufactures it and has deployed HomeByMe for Home Retailers in 72 stores in France and has plans to roll out the solution to all its 120 stores internationally.

“In just a year, more than 6,000 customer design projects have already been created and saved using the solution, including 8,200 high resolution renderings of customer room layouts,” noted Dassault Systèmes in a press release this month. In 2021, Gautier will integrate the solution into the Gautier website, which will enable customers to design and complete their projects and purchases online from either the comfort of their homes or in store with a trained interior designer.

“Gautier is more than just a retailer and manufacturer. We are evolving toward a new role as an interior designer that can provide customers with personalized advice, an immersive design experience and a complete home décor offer, which we feel are key to customer satisfaction and loyalty,” said David Soulard, CEO of Gautier. “We wanted a scalable 3D design planner that could provide state-of-the-art photorealistic renderings and virtual and augmented reality capabilities, as well as centralize all products and both planner and configurator functionalities. Over the next decade, Dassault Systèmes’ ‘HomeByMe for Home Retailers’ solution will be the core of our strategy to personally cater to each customer and strengthen our brand.”

(Image courtesy of Gautier.)

(Image courtesy of Gautier.)

The press release describes how HomeByMe for Home Retailers delivers a seamless web-to-store omnichannel 3D experience that engages consumers and increases sales. On a side note, omnichannel relates to the different methods of shopping available to consumers, such as online, in a physical store, or by phone.

“Surveys have shown that omnichannel strategies in home improvement significantly contribute to increased customer engagement and reinforcement of purchasing decisions – a key driver in the current pandemic. In addition, 3D planning solutions deliver higher customer satisfaction on projects because they were actively engaged in their design and in getting it right,” said Vincent Picou, CEO of 3DVIA, Dassault Systèmes. “Gautier is the first international retailer to offer ‘HomeByMe for Home Retailers’ in its stores, confirming its commitment to helping customers make the right decisions for their home.”

We could see how having HomeByMe for Home Retailers on a retailer’s website could enhance the customer experience, especially during a pandemic, when online shopping has been through the roof. Sometimes it’s hard to tell that much about a product just from looking at it online. I’m sure we’ve all experienced this over the last year, when a purchase shows up and it’s not what was expected, so we have to return it.

HomeByMe is a fairly new offering from Dassault Systèmes having launched in 2020, and in good timing with all the recent online shopping I might add. According to Dassault, the solution was developed specifically to address the needs of home retailers, providing a solution that facilitates premium in-store and online experiences to encourage collaborative engagement and increase sales conversions.

It enables users to create sales-ready 3D floor plans in minutes.

Key features noted by Dassault Systèmes include:

  • Auto-generated proposals: Provide recommendations and inspire your customers with fast, accurate auto-generated layout recommendations in seconds
  • Complete personalization: Allow users to create with ease highly detailed designs with exact dimensions and preferences, empowered by rich functionality and an intuitive interface
  • Comprehensive product integration and rich product viewer: Inspire customers with full integration of your product sets and real-time stock availability, with 360-degree 3D views that shows off your entire catalog
  • Up-to-date catalog and price list integration: Integrated price lists, including promotions, offer full transparency with live cost calculations and totals, as well as cross-sell and upsell opportunities
  • Simple rollout and use: Include full white label customization and cloud-based, with simple API-based integration to achieve time to market in just weeks

Ultimately, the HomeByMe for Home Retailers 3D planning solution aims to help sales teams inspire their customers and accelerate sales with its easy-to-use web-based platform, according to Dassault Systèmes.

All the products are available online and are powered by 3DVIA and the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. The HomeByMe product portfolio (which is now the 3DVIA product portfolio) also includes HomeByMe for Kitchen Retailers for kitchen design planning, and HomeByMe for consumers to design and share their housing projects. So, if you’re looking to do a makeover, you can check out the HomeByMe solution.

Speaking of makeovers, it looks like 3DVIA has gotten its own makeover. The 3DVIA product portfolio is now all about HomeByMe.  

So what happened to 3DVIA Make, 3DVIA Composer, and so on? We reached out to Dassault Systèmes to get the scoop.

Before we get to that, let’s take a trip down memory lane to learn more about the evolution of 3DVIA. From what we gathered, 3DVIA was initially unveiled in June 2007 as a new brand for providing 3D online lifelike experiences, which we’re guessing came from the Dassault acquisition of Virtools in 2005, a company known for its “applications that allow users not familiar with 3D modeling to quickly and easily add life experience to any 3D object. As an example, using the company’s technology, users can experience the shopping behavior of a typical consumer in a supermarket or visualize the ergonomics of a driver as he or she drives a car through a city.”

Then in November 2007, Dassault Systèmes announced the availability of the 3DVIA Composer product line, shortly after acquiring Seemage, a company know for repurposing existing product design data for the creation of 2D and 3D product communications, including technical illustrations, 3D animations, and interactive online applications.

In 2008 3DVIA moved to the mobile market with the release of 3DVIA Mobile.

There was also 3DVIA Shape 2.0, a free online 3D modeling software launched in 2008 that allows users to reuse or remix models from other 3DVIA users, then slew of other products followed, including 3DVIA Mobile in 2009, the launch of the 3DVIA Store on 3DVIA.com (which offered “ready-to-use” 3D models from partners), and 3DVIA Studio in 2010.

Then in 2015 Dassault tapped into the retail market with 3DVIA Make, a “3D printing-ready application to personalize goods for online retail.”

Fast forward to now, and none of the above seem to exist. When you go to www.3DVIA.com, you get the online 3D By Me 3D space planning solutions website.

We were curious about the 3DVIA transition, and as mentioned earlier, we reached out to Dassault Systèmes to get some answers.

Our Q & A with Simon Booker, VP Sales & Marketing 3DVIA, Dassault Systèmes follows.

When was HomeByMe originally launched? 

HomeByMe was from the acquisition of SquareClock in 2012. HomeByMe.com for consumers has been available since 2016, and before that, via a downloadable version. HomeByMe for Kitchen Retailers was launched in 2019. HomeByMe for Home Retailers was launched last year in 2020.

It looks like 3DVIA got a makeover and is now fully focused on the retail/home/interior space? What happened to 3DVIA Composer?

3DVIA Composer is now part of the CATIA brand with all of the same functionality.

The 3DVIA brand solutions are based on HomeByMe, which is new technology dedicated to delivering an easy-to-use 3D planning solution. It allows consumers and retailer customers to create, personalize and visualize the room of their dreams and accelerate omnichannel sales cycles with sales-ready projects.

So today 3DVIA focuses on the retail and consumer markets, consisting of HomeByMe, HomeByMe for Kitchen Retailers, and HomeByMe for Home Retailer that now make up the 3DVIA portfolio.

To conclude, we think the HomeByMe idea is pretty cool and may try it out ourselves. You too can give it a whirl. Go to https://home.by.me/en/.