American Furniture Warehouse brings rooms to life – in 3D

A Southwestern furniture retailer is offering customers the chance to design rooms online with a new 3D design tool.

American Furniture Warehouse (AFW) is rolling out the AFW Room Planner, a 3D solution based on the Marxent 3D Cloud platform.

The new tool enables shoppers to design their own spaces from home or in collaboration with associates on the sales floor. AFW associates and customers can leverage proprietary Marxent Design from Photo technology to design by dragging and dropping products from inspirational photos into a simulated 3D room. 

As a result, shoppers can buy entire rooms online. AFW is able to re-use its existing 3D content across apps, as well as content from manufacturers that have content on the Marxent 3D Cloud platform.

An increasing number of retailers are using VR and AR technology solutions to digitally bring home furnishings products to life and provide realistic simulations of how furniture items would look in a customer’s personal space. The most notable is Amazon Showroom, which enables shoppers to place realistic 3D images of home furnishings into a customizable virtual living room. More recent examples include buybuy Baby and Walmart.

"At AFW we are proud to offer our customers unique experiences in a family environment, without the sales pressure," said Tony Mitchell, director of global logistics for AFW. "3D has become a key part of the AFW experience. It allows products to be explored, touched, felt, interacted with outside of the store environment and these experiences are as close as you can get to an in-store interaction with a product.” 

Headquartered in Englewood, Colo., American Furniture Warehouse operates 14 locations throughout Colorado, Arizona, and Texas.