Visual Merchandising for Business Decision Makers
At the beginning of 2003 Procter and Gamble asked us to create a new kind of Visual Merchandising application. Codenamed Mary Shelf, the first of a new generation of visual merchandising software was designed, developed and delivered by us in May 2003.
Click on the image above to see a larger, higher quality version of one of ‘Mary Shelf’’s first Hair Care Planogram renders.
Fifth Dimension Commissioned by Procter and Gamble to Build the Next Generation of Visual Merchandising Software
It was a strange request. Why was that? Well, Procter and Gamble at the time owned global software licenses for all the first generation shelf planning planogram tools i.e. InterCept, ProSpace, Apollo, Spaceman etc. So it seemed strange to us that they would want to build another one.
As it turned out, P&G had decided that their current systems had become too difficult to learn and were overburdened with complex functionality that most of their users didn’t need on a day to day basis.
In fact, these users were divided into several groups e.g. full-time experts in merchandise planning, occasional users who had, at one time, been fully trained but who used the software infrequently and business decision makers and communicators who couldn’t use the software because it was too time consuming to master. This last group were in the majority by a big margin.
After long internal discussions, P&G had concluded that they needed urgently to address this issue since many of their staff needed to communicate new merchandising concepts, in the form of a ’standard’ planogram, showing new products or merchandising initiatives in the context of their typical in-store competitive set, brands, sub-categories etc and were unable to do so. Sometimes this was because the full-tme experts were too busy to help and sometimes because the resource was simply not available and the particular person had forgotten how to use the available software.
Photo-Realism for Visual Merchandising
P&G also felt that the previous generation of software had not kept pace with the latest needs of visual merchandisers and that it was not capable of realistically representing new merchandising concepts, point-of-sale graphics, shelf edge labels, innovative header boards etc at the highest level of photo-realism they thought was possible by then.
They wanted the new software to ceate visually compelling, impactful but realistic presentation output that could be printed at any size. To achieve this goal it needed to overcome the graphics limitations in previous software and use high resolution images of individual products as the basic building blocks for all photo-realisticaly rendered images of in-store display proposals.
Since we were already working with them on several high quality Virtual Store projects at the time, Fifth Dimension was aked by P&G to build them a new generation of visual merchandising tools, which would be far easier to use than the current software, capable of being used by a wider range of users - particulalry business decision makers, and capable of the highest quality image rendering possible. The software would also have to be able to read and write all standard planogram formats and be fully compatible with existing systems, product imaging standards and display fixturing so that existing planograms could be used as a starting point to develop new plans.
Virtual Shelf
After some intense collaborative work with P&G’s project managers, we built an exemplar based on earlier developments we had explored in late 2002.
The beta version was enthusiastically welcomed by P&G, but it triggered a deluge of functionality requests! By late April we had produced the first version - for ‘Mary’; hence the codename.
P&G were so delighted with the new application they purchased 80 Licenses straight off. It was only a matter of weeks before they asked us to add even more richness to the rendering engine. That was the beginning of a very exciting journey which resulted in Fifth Dimension creating what was to become a complete family of Virtual Shelf applications. The Chilled Juice planogram render to the right was one of the first outputs from the system.
But that’s (yet) another story!
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
The mind boggles to comprehend how retailers’ managed to plan miles and miles of shelf space without having a perfect visual reference as a starting point. Its got to win brownie points from shelf stackers up to chief execs!
Hello. I think the article is really interesting. I am even interested in reading more. How soon will you update your blog?