The End of the Lifestyle Shoot? How AI is Reinventing Room Scene Photography
Consider a deep charcoal upholstered sectional sofa, quality controlled by the manufacturer, sent to the distributor, and ready for consumer purchase and delivery.
There’s a perfect home out there for this piece of furniture, so should it go to waste? No.
A raw product photo like this just doesn’t do service to the sofa — imagine standing next to it.
How can it find the best-fit buyer? It needs attractive photos. This is true for:
- Marketplaces
- DTC, and
- Catalogs
Sales will mostly happen online, and yet ecommerce competition in furniture & decor is fierce. Let’s unpack that.
Furniture and Decor Buyers Want Room Scene Photography
The quality of photos differentiates sellers. For example, product photography is the most important factor for 90% of Etsy shoppers, more significant than the reviews, the price, and shipping fees.
With higher quality photos, a furniture retailer causes greater sales and fewer returns.
Importantly, a raw product photo is no match for detail-oriented room scene photography.
Consider the charcoal sectional again:
Our sofa has become photorealistic. It looks like what it really is: a nice place to sit.
- The aesthetic of the couch is enhanced.
- Its utility as a room feature for use is clear.
The living room is full though not overly so, while the lines from the art and windows help define the space. The camera centers on the sofa, while allowing the other items to frame it.
Light from the windows leaves a warm atmosphere. Couch texture is evident and there is a lack of blurring. The green of plants outside and inside the home combines with furniture colors.
The benefit of contextually-driven photography is significant for sales. By using it in lieu of raw product photos and low-performing room scene photos:
- Fast-growing dance sneaker brand Fuego improved its ROAS by 3.5x for paid social campaigns.
- Renowned Italian fashion accessory brand Portolano increased conversions by 25% for featured products on Faire.
With some traditional studios, our furniture retailer can definitely get a great photo for one couch. But at the enterprise level a retailer will have trouble scaling with these vendors.
Traditional Studios Impose Four Burdens on Furniture Retailers
A traditional studio is a service principally of labor, not technology, compared to an AI subscription model.
This causes four problems for customers of these legacy vendors:
- Time and hassle
- Pricing
- Inadequate customer support
- Inconsistency
Working with traditional studios involves more time and hassle
As a service principally of labor, it takes more time to produce and edit room scene photographs. A pre-existing AI program is not being run — primarily human hands are at work.
Two factors matter for photo scalability here:
- The speed of getting raw room scene photos
- The speed of editing and finishing room scene photos
Each lifestyle shoot takes time. That is, even without scheduling issues.
- Good photographers have different expertise and schedules. There are also bad photographers.
- Our furniture retailer sells many furniture and decor items, each type requiring a different scene.
- The back-and-forth of quality control and editing, perhaps with multiple studios, is its own chaotic process.
Furniture retailers have a hard time getting enough quick-turnaround, affordable studio stills. This is evident because furniture and decor items on popular marketplaces frequently signal to shoppers with raw product photos.
Traditional studios are expensive and have limited capacity
Consider two aspects of traditional studio pricing.
- Cost
- Capacity
First, each photo shoot costs more at the margin for a traditional studio to produce than an AI image output costs for a SaaS company. As a result, hiring a high-performing studio for a day can lead to a price tag of up to $2000.
Second, a traditional studio has limited capacity.
Thus traditional studios find it difficult to provide enterprise-level packages with per-unit discounts. An AI, assuming enough computational resources, has essentially limitless capacity.
Multiple vendors and tools causes brand and creative incoherence
Juggling multiple sources of content assets, including multiple vendors, leads to inconsistency across photos.
Traditional studios provide inadequate customer support
Traditional studios can’t offer high-quality AI-powered support.
But an end-to-end, or generate-to-publish, AI-powered visual content service is built differently.
As you continue reading, focus on how brand and ecommerce leads at furniture retailers can:
- Save money
- Save time and hassle
- Maintain photo quality
- Maintain brand consistency across photos
Generative AI Can Create Excellent Room Scene Photography
AI-powered visual content creation has reached a point where ecommerce and brand teams at retailers can send far stronger signals to online shoppers.
- Our A/B tests of independent panels of Amazon customers show that AI-generated lifestyle imagery leads to higher conversion than raw product photos.
- The sales-boosting lifestyle photos for the brands just discussed, Fuego and Portolano, were generated by an AI.
The process of getting AI lifestyle imagery is simple:
- Take raw product photos
- Provide instructions
- Receive the room scene photos
- Exert quality control
- Publish
But one AI is not the same as another.
Let’s take the example of a mattress.
Observe the work of one AI-powered photo service:
This room scene photo is worse than the product set on white.
Consider that the AI’s hallucinations were not removed during quality control, or are so prevalent that the firm could not afford to spend time removing them from all customer deliverables.
Technical issues, more generally, can still happen with an AI service. Furniture retailers need high quality stills for shoppers to see.
Compare this to the output of another AI:
The second photo is better. Shoppers no longer need to imagine what the mattress would look like in a bedroom.
The mattress is fitted to context; it has become true-to-life. Shoppers no longer have to endure poor photo features like masking or incorrect props.
The quality photos you’ve seen so far were produced by Snappr AI. Let’s discuss it.
Snappr AI: Providing Lifestyle Photos Without the Shoots
Furniture retailers who try Snappr are in good company:
- 73% of the Fortune 500
- 48% of the A16Z Top 100 Marketplace
Enterprise brand and ecommerce decision-makers trust Snappr with tight deadlines and high quality standards.
This is in part because Snappr AI is full service. A brand essentially lays out what it wants and then Snappr delivers.
How the AI works
Snappr’s objective is to make its AI as tailored to the industry as it can be.
At base, Snappr AI has been trained on decor-specific datasets. It has experience with, for example, scene composition and background generation for homes.
Additionally, it keeps improving.
- It adapts to a customer’s creative and brand guidelines.
- It learns as a customer scales its photo generation; it continuously trains on the approved output for each customer.
- It is improved iteratively through in-house Snappr expertise.
Use cases for this AI include:
- Focusing on one individual piece
- Cross-selling to an additional piece
- Showing off a furniture and decor collection
After generating an image, Snappr’s team does quality control. Hallucinations, for example, are removed.
Unlike other AI services, Snappr AI customers receive completed room scene photos within 24 hours, from placement of an order through editing and customer support.
In part this is possible because every bit of visual content is stored in one place, both tagged and searchable.
This simplification enabled Fuego and Portolano to save 30% of creative workflow time.
Generally, one revision is permitted per image. This includes:
- Product integrity issues
- Distracting elements in composition
- Touch ups in lighting, resolution, and realism
If a retailer finds that a competitor’s image is superior to a Snappr AI photo, Snappr offers free improvements to ensure satisfaction.
If a retailer wants to edit a photo themselves, they can use Snappr’s tools to retouch skin tones, perform color enhancement, and remove objects or flaws on the product or in the background.
Enterprise packages
Enterprise pricing is annual, conferring a sum of credits. These do not expire and any amount can be used at any time.
In effect, each product-in-use photo, with edits included, costs around $1. Other photo types–a studio pure product photo or a collection showcase–cost different amounts of credits.
Paid-for photos include a perpetual license.
The Cutting Edge of Furniture and Decor Marketing
High-quality photos provide a competitive edge when furniture retailers need every one they can get.
Raw product photos don’t cut it.
Traditional studios can’t scale with retailers.
But Snappr’s generative AI, adapted to the decor space, can provide any number of quality-controlled, high-converting stills within a 24-hour timeframe.
The process is simple: Take a shot of your product, send it to Snappr, and stop the scroll.
Talk with the Snappr team to learn more. Book a demo for free.
