WIRED Retail 2015, our second annual one-day summit focusing on the future of retail, will convene in London on November 23. The Startup Stage will run alongside the Main Stage talks. Here, a wide range of fast-growing businesses working in the retail space will introduce their organisations and explain their objectives, aims and applications.
The WIRED Retail Startup stage will showcase startups and growth-stage businesses vying for our audience’s attention. They represent the vanguard of the current creative era for retail, and have been hand-picked for their potential to disrupt business-as-usual.
We preview one of our speakers: Cimagine
Founders: Yoni Nevo, Nir Daube, Ozi Egri, Amiram Avraham
Launched: August 2012 (active from January 2013)
Headquarters: Israel
Staff: 15
Funding: well-funded and backed by leading investors
What is your USP?
Cimagine provides a markerless augmented reality (AR) visualisation platform for retailers and brands, which enables users to visualise products in life-like 3D, at a click of a button.
The platform utilises mobile and wearable devices, and can be easily integrated and used across multiple channels. The SaaS service helps our customers differentiate themselves and provides a value-ad, personalised shopping experience, which increases sales.
Cimagine was chosen by Forbes, Microsoft and Coca Cola as one of Israel’s most promising start-ups, and boasts the largest implementation of AR in retail to date with Shop Direct, and the world's first Endless AR showroom at John Lewis – two of the UK's largest retailers.
How do you make money?
Cimagine significantly enhances the shopping experience and increases sales. Just as our platform, our business model is simple too. We currently charge retailers and brands who add the Cimagine buttons to their product pages using a SaaS model.
Fees include a set-up fee to cover some of our costs for setting up the service and creating the relevant content (eg 3D models), as well as a recurring monthly fee, both are currently based on the number of items augmented by Cimagine.
Who do you view as your competitors?
Our competitors are either AR catalogue companies such as Sayduck and Adornably, and software houses who provide bespoke development services for AR projects. All competitors typically use one of the few AR SDKs available in the market, which are not necessarily optimised for visualisation.
How would you sum up your company ethos?
Leveraging our unique computer vision know-how, and our focused product definition and execution, we believe that in order to succeed, AR platforms need to be easy to use by any user, provide life-like visualisation, and be easy to integrate.
Our vision is that in just a few years, people will insist on visualising any product in their own space before buying it. Our mission is to become the visualisation platform of choice for retailers and brands as this vision materialises.
Where do you see Cimagine in five years' time?
We envision Cimagine's platform integrated into the catalogues, sales tools and social media campaigns of most of the world's leading retailers and brands, used by tens of millions of consumers to visualise every major product before purchasing it.
WIRED Retail returns to London on November 23 at St Pancras Renaissance Hotel. Last year's event sold out, so secure your place now: WIRED subscribers save 10 percent. We also have a limited number of half-price tickets available for retail sector startups. For more information visit: wiredevent.co.uk/wired-retail-2015.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
