虚拟购物的新篇章 | Obsess 如何打造沉浸式购物体验

Neha Singh, founder of virtual store platform Obsess, explains how her company makes e-commerce more engaging, why she recommends brands to keep their virtual spaces lifelike, and what she believes is the next frontier for digitized retail.

With most physical stores shuttered during the long months of quarantine, consumers turned to online shopping in droves for everything from essential goods to fashion and furniture. A recent United Nations Conference on Trade and Development report reveals that the global e-commerce sector rose from 16 to 19 per cent in 2020 and took in a whopping €22 trillion in revenue. Almost every company, large or small, had to reimagine their online presence and periodically introduce new features. VR and AR technologies like those offered by New York startup Obsess provide a wide range of retailers with the ability to re-create existing physical stores on their websites. Established in 2018, the virtual store platform has become the go-to for brands as varied as Tommy Hilfiger, Samsung and Ulta Beauty. We spoke to founder Neha Singh about her flourishing business and the role design continues to play in this everchanging industry.

Talk about your background and the motivation behind Obsess.

NEHA SINGH: I studied computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before working as a software lead at Google, where I helped program integrated advertising platform AdWords. During that time, I also fulfilled my desire to study fashion by taking classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). Though I never pursued the discipline, I decided to find a way to combine my two passions.

Joining luxury e-commerce marketplace startup AHAlife, I was tasked with creating a more intuitive shopping interface. However, I quickly realized that it would be challenging to create a truly immersive experience using the standard thumbnail grid typical on sites like Shopify and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This search and filter template is something Amazon introduced 25 years ago to sell books and that most retailers have had to adopt for every other kind of product. If you wanted to do something different, you needed to invest in custom solutions and work with a large engineering team. Most e-commerce platforms still look and operate this way.

This ongoing dilemma prompted me to start Obsess. I love fashion and shopping but wanted to find a way of going to stores without actually having to go into stores, which of course became relevant during the past year. Our customized software lets consumers navigate through stores and click on the products they're interested in for more information and make purchases. What we do is essentially experiential e-commerce, translating how retailers have gone from being purely transactional to experience-based. We aim to take this a step further and create seamless omnichannel strategies that allow products to be part of any scenario. We make virtual stores for brands that are visual, immersive, interactive and discovery-driven.

Obsess's software breaks the mould of standard thumbnail grids by showing how products can be used in context. The underwater coral boutique features a monochromatic selection of clothes by INSPR, Elisabetta Franchi, Alice and Olivia, and others.

Virtual experiences have become standard in the past year in everything from art auctions to experimental design exhibitions, which sometimes become too gimmicky or outlandish. How do you rein in these new technologies and ensure that your virtual stores are conducive to what consumers want?

Whenever working with virtual reality, you end up toeing a delicate line between realism and video-game fantasy. That being said, this format gives us a lot of freedom. Beyond re-creating actual stores, we're able to help our clients envision entirely new environments to display their products. We can create scenarios that allow consumers to discover products in more contextual ways and that simulate how they might be used in context, which makes so much more sense than just seeing them on a white background. Traditional grids tend to show objects as different as shoes and dresses in the same size. Whereas, as soon as you put these items into a 3D realistic setting, you can see how they vary.

We've recently experimented with our own aggregated store concept called Shopobsess.co, in which we bring different products together in thematic stagings such as the interior of a private jet, a ski resort, a wellness shop situated in a forest or a tech-savvy home. The underwater coral boutique directly incorporates the platform's Instagram account and features a monochromatic selection of clothes by INSPR, Elisabetta Franchi, Alice and Olivia, and others. These trend-sensitive virtual stores show our clients what's possible.

In terms of design, this type of technology provides new opportunities and challenges. You can work with any material, finish or shape. However, you're still essentially dealing with the same conditions, such as finding the right way of lighting a space. Though the possibilities are endless, our recommendation to brands, for the time being, is to keep these virtual spaces as grounded and lifelike as possible so that customers can get used to this new format.

A big part of why these experiences are now available is that the graphic capabilities of our phones have come a long way in the past decade. A large portion of e-commerce traffic comes from mobile devices. We're now able to accommodate this type of engagement with as much innovation as solutions developed for desktop computers. It's easy to work with highly stylized and advanced game aesthetics, but it's harder to work with photorealism, which is what luxury brands tend to look for. Customers are more comfortable shopping in an environment that looks realistic versus having the 'uncanny valley' feeling. We spent a long time developing our software to answer this demand and continue to make improvements.

Though Obsess's main business centres on re-creating existing physical stores for specific brands, Shopobsess.co shows what its software can do in terms of imagining and materializing completely different shopping environments.

What's the process that you and your team engage in when working with a client?

There are two ways in which we work with our clients. One set of brands already have in-house 3D modelling capabilities. It's often the same teams that design the physical retail spaces that also develop the virtual platforms. In these cases, we provide insight based on the data we've collected. After launching about 80 virtual stores in the past few years, we've got a good sense of how consumers behave in these environments and interact with the different elements. We're able to determine which features work and which don't. We might suggest a particular layout and distribution of a product display so that a visitor is sure to engage with the entire virtual store and not just one room. The in-house designers take that feedback, build their spaces and then send us their standard 3D files so that they can be processed using our software.

We also work with a lot of brands that might not have these capabilities. In that case, we do the 3D modelling for them based on their creative direction. The curation always comes from the company, because they are the strongest at it. We can, of course, brainstorm with them and give our feedback. It's a collaborative process that typically takes two to four months. Part of the process is deciding what additional content we want to include. We've discovered that by providing a diverse range of content – texts, video and other visuals – customers stay engaged for longer, which means they shop more. Once all of this is determined and the products have been merchandized, we can add the interactive layer.

Through an aggregated store concept called Shopobsess.co, Singh and team bring different products together in thematic stagings such as the interior of a private jet.

What effect did the pandemic have on your business and the need for this technology? How have the requirements changed?

We saw a massive increase in demand over the last 14 months. In 2020, we had a 400 per cent boost in inbound interest. Before the pandemic, companies viewed our software as a great innovation, a new concept they had to try and fit into something else they were already doing. During this period, our clients began coming to us with more specific needs, both in terms of the overall design and functionality of what many are now calling their virtual flagships. Brands realize that they have to put as much effort and attention into these platforms as they do their actual stores.

Some of these new requirements include integrating live chat features that let customers talk directly to sales reps as if they were in a physical store. More and more B2B companies are using our platform for wholesale while still looking for the same quality of experience for their clients. A few have even asked us to integrate Requests for Proposal (RFP's), which is something entirely new. This new level of demand was expected to eventually take hold especially given the increase in e-commerce over the past few years. COVID-19 accelerated everything.

This is an edited version of an interview that originally featured in Frame 141. To read the full conversation, buy your copy here.