B2B Site ‘Hello Raye’ Unveils 3D Rendering SaaS Tool for Furniture Buyers, Manufacturers

If a chair is available in 200 colors, it’s difficult to visualize the one you want.

It’s the kind of pre-purchase decision that B2B furniture buyers routinely face and the reason marketplace Hello Raye has launched a new web-based tool that solves this problem for the commercial buyers and sellers who use its site.

With the company’s new interactive rendering tool called “Snapshots,” users can take an existing 3D file, customize it, and then use it to show customers the furniture of their choice in an immersive setting.

“Snapshots aims to solve that problem for these smaller mid-size brands who can’t spend a ton of money on a 3D customizer/visualizer for themselves,” CEO Brian Chiou told PYMNTS.

With Snapshots, users who don’t have the tools or skills to do this themselves can customize an image with their choice of color, material, finish and sheen. They can build an image with their choice of, for example, a leather back or a velvet one, brass wheels or aluminum, and so on.

Users can also group multiple images so that they — and their own customers — can visualize different products or altered versions of the same product together and compare them side by side.

“You can say, ‘Hey, here’s four different options with different finishes for the back and different wheelbases. Which one do you like?’ You can do that on the fly,” Chiou explained.

Snapshots enables users to do this without needing to have their own software or the skills to use it.

Users can subscribe to Snapshot or make one-off purchases.

Tech-Enabling Dealers

Hello Raye is developing another new release that will help the industry cope with current supply chain issues. It will help designers find the right products that can be delivered at the right time. Without promising a lead time, it will share lead times on similar projects that were previously fulfilled.

The pandemic has sped commercial furniture brands’ move to selling online, direct to consumers.

“I think when you have major players like Restoration Hardware and Wayfair, obviously the beast in the room when it comes to buying furniture online, people are like, ‘The old-school way of showrooms, handshakes, etc., that’s kind of shifted a little bit, for better or for worse,’” Chiou said.

Hello Raye has positioned itself to serve the commercial industry and B2B market that does not cut out the dealer. The company respects the relationships dealers have with designers, the knowledge they have of the brands they represent, and the contractual obligations many commercial brands have to work strictly through dealers.