Search Instagram for “kitchen design,” and you’ll find photos of the most beautifully-designed spaces, full of items that should be easy to buy.
These days, the separation between seeing a photo of the product and getting it in your house is way too far, says Beck Besecker, the CEO of Marxent Labs, LLC. Even a picture of an item that is posted online by the retailer might leave you scrolling through endless pages of an online catalog to find that one thing that caught your eye. Then it’s a leap of faith to buy that item based off of a handful of 2D pictures and some dimensions listed online.
“There’s $70 billion that just never gets spent by the consumer because they don’t want to jump into the project,” Besecker said. In the coming years, he explained, shoppers will be able to go from a photo on social media to “fully engage the product: Spin it, zoom in real close, put it in your room.”
Marxent, which is split between offices in St. Petersburg and Ohio, specializes in developing programs to make this vision a reality for retailers and their customers around the world as they adapt to new technologies, from 3D and high-resolution product listings to virtual and augmented reality.
For example, Macy’s customers use Marxent technology to build out a virtual version of their living room on an iPad in a store and then put on a virtual reality headset on to see how different pieces of furniture would look in a 3D version of their space. This not only helps the customer to better plan for their space, but cuts back on the number of floor models on display in the store and drastically reduces the number of customer returns.
Another product, Marxent’s 3D Room designer program Photo to Floorplan, also allows consumers to more easily design their space from home. For example, a user can enter the dimensions of their room, accounting for windows, slanted ceilings or current fixtures and then drag new items into that space and see how it looks.
“It gives them that chance to create and play,” Besecker said. He described the program as a “Minecraft for Moms,” in reference to the video game phenomenon in which players can build entire cities out of virtual blocks.
“It all snaps together like Legos,” he said. “What’s exciting about this is we feel like we sort of crossed the last bridge… like we can help that person be inspired and design at the same time.”
One hurdle, he said, is when a consumer wants to shop for items across multiple retailers, as an interior designer would. The company is currently developing shared content marketplaces to overcome it.
Marxent currently has about 50 total employees, with 20 in the St. Pete office, 30 at its headquarters in Miamisburg, Ohio and a few in its London office, which opened this year. It is in the planning stages of its next funding round. The company’s most recent funding resulted in $2.07 million raised in March 2018, with a total of more than $19 million in VC investments since its founding in 2011, according to the company.
In May, the company announced it was partnering with a Parisian digital home décor agency, Decod, to further advance 3D modeling technologies for retailers.
In addition to Macy’s Marxent’s clients include Ashley HomeStores, Office Depot, Bob’s Discount Furniture, American Furniture Warehouse and American Woodmark. The clients pay monthly to access the company’s trove of virtual reality and augmented reality software options.
