Interview with Seek CEO Jon Cheney on AR in Retail and ecommerce
Interview with Seek CEO Jon Cheney on AR in Retail and ecommerce
TRANSCRIPT:
Darius 0:02 Welcome to another retail tech podcast interview. My name is Darius Vasefi and in this podcast I speak with leaders, experts and entrepreneurs involved in all aspects of retail and e commerce. And today I'm speaking with john Cheney, from a company called seeks seek xR, which helps brands and retailers, I guess create and take, use 3d images and AR. So how are you today? JOHN?
Jon 0:34 Doing great,
Darius 0:34 are you there's great, thank you for joining me. So what is a six seek xR?
Jon 0:42 You know, seek has been different things over the years. But But today, we really kind of hang our hat on three pillars that helped drive augmented reality in 3d at scale. And it's really around the creation, management and then distribution of 3d content.
Darius 1:01 Okay, so let's start from the creation part. How do you work with companies, your customers to do that?
Jon 1:09 Yeah, you know, and creation is, is probably the most tedious part of 3d and AR, right. And that could range from, you know, creating a 3d model of a kitchen table that needs to go up on a furniture website that somebody's selling, and it could be as complex as an AR game, right? Or something like Pokemon Go, that's a full fledged app and experience and universe of its own. We've actually, throughout the history of seek, really hit that entire range of experiences, you know, full on, full on experiences that, you know, you would typically look to an agency to create, we've done a little bit of that in the past, but, but at this point, we really focus on leveraging others, right seek is more of the network and the central hub that helps brands typically come, you know, come to one place to be able to find everything they need, right, so if a company has, you know, 1000 products they need created into, into, you know, 3d models to then be able to use somewhere, they can do that through our system. And we have a network of the best modeling agencies and companies and shops all around the world, that, that create 3d models, and those are, you know, people that, that live here in the US and some that live in Bangladesh, in southern Australia, and some in Russia and all over the world. And so we have a system called seek Nexus that helps distribute that so people can get on and, and seek Nexus and say, Hey, I need 20 models, or I need this custom experience made or I need 10,000 models and and our network is able to distribute that work and get it done quickly. And in the right way.
Darius 2:52 Well, that's interesting. So is it actually a software solution? Or the network or both?
Jon 3:00 Yeah, yeah, it's so the, when a 3d model is created, the end work being done is being done by an artist, right? It's actually a manual labor type process, right? You're sitting on the computer using 3d software to create these things. But some models can take 2030 4060 100 hours and then if you have a more complex experience can be much longer than that. And so seek doesn't employ we do employ some 3d modelers that really manage the system and, and you know, really high level 3d knowledge, I guess, is what they're there for, and to help guide our system, but seek next this and seek studio is a software platform that brands can can get in and use to order and manage their content.
Darius 3:48 Okay, so, so seek Nexus is pretty much for the creation side of it. Correct? Okay. And you mentioned 30 to 100 hours or more is that like, per product?
Jon 4:02 It can be Yeah. You know, when you're, let's say, you're creating a 3d model of a Barbie, we've actually done that before. If you have to physically go in to into a 3d modeling software, and it's like, it's almost like taking clay digitally, right, and you have to mold the head, and you have to mold the eyes. And you have to, it's, it's an art, it's a it's really an art, you know, they're they're 3d artists. And it's not just, you know, taking pictures of the Barbie and, you know, converting it into a 3d model, that type of process while photogrammetry is does work, sometimes most of the time it's not going to get the job done you need and the way you need it done. And so in the same way that virtually every 3d model has been created for game for video games for movies. And for a no other instances where 3d models were used. The same process is still used to create those models for for an e commerce perspective, right and so and so you know, you're oftentimes If the model is complex enough, you could be, you know, it might cost a few $100, maybe even a few $1,000 to create a model most models from, say, like a furniture company, or maybe shoes, you know, kind of more basic products, they're, you know, you're typically not spending more than, you know, 70 to $150 per model. But that's because there are companies out there that have, you know, mastered the processes, and they have teams of people that can do each step along the way. But really, they are, you know, you ask, Is it 30 to 60 hours? Yeah, I absolutely can be, when, when you're creating something from scratch and trying to get it just right. I mean, you have to technically model every strand of hair. And there's ways to speed that process up, you know, for the for the Barbie example. And you have to make the eyes and you got to make the eyelashes and you have to make the feet and the toes, and you have to go in and zoom in and, and make it happen. Right. And they're using visual references, pictures, typically, to create those models, but but it's a process, and it's one that is very impressive to watch.
Darius 6:00 Interesting. Aren't there, like 3d cameras that can actually do this as well? I don't know for sure. But I heard something about that.
Jon 6:10 Absolutely, yeah, no, there's there's a lot of scanning technology out there. You know, our tech scanners is one of the one of the bigger ones, but there's a lot of them out there. And then people build their own custom rigs as well, where they'll they'll set up, you know, kind of a 360, you know, photo shoot almost where they'll put, you know, 96 cameras that all in sequence, take a picture at the same time. And, and, you know, they, you know, they then program some computer to stitch it all together. And there's, there's pros and cons to doing that process. Typically, that process is more expensive, because the technology is still very nascent 3d modeling in the way I was talking about where you're building it from scratch has been around for a very long since the 80s, really, is when the first 3d modeling started, when video games, were first kind of introduced, as well as in movies, of course, but but the scanning technology can be done in a week, we partnered with a lot of different companies out there that do scanning at different scale, and you can scan anything from, you know, a shoe, to, to a car, right and technically even a house right, you can actually walk around, I think with the with the new iPad pros, they have a LIDAR sensor in them in the camera. And so you can actually go around and scan your hole you walk around your room and you know, get coverage of the whole thing. And actually, it will spit out a 3d model of the room. The quality is not perfect yet, but it's pretty dang good. And for the right use case, that that scanning technology works at different scales.
Darius 7:43 Okay, so it's really the matter of, I guess the matter of quality and cost right now.
Jon 7:50 That make Yeah, it's quality and cost and and then capabilities. So without getting too technical. Let's just take a shoe for example. If you if you take a shoe and you scan it, you're basically taking a picture of it right, and so to to change it later on, let's say let's say it's a Nike shoe, and they, they have five different color variations. So in order to get the shoe, in those five color variations, what Nike would have to do is they would have to ship five shoes to a facility, it's then scanned, and then you know, they can ship them back or throw their shoes away. Or typically they only get one so they could put one on each foot and have fun and hop around. But but that's the process, you have to scan each shoe individually. Now, if you take the first method that I talked about, where you're creating this 3d model from scratch, and you're building the soul, and you're building the tongue of the shoe, and you're building the inside of the shoe laces, and I don't know all the technical names for a shoe, but your bill, if you're building each component individually, you can then actually go in digitally. And very quickly say, Alright, we need a green one and a red one and a blue one and a yellow one and the silver one and boom. And we could have 50 variations created in minutes, right. And then and then later on, you can use that that model in a different way. Because each piece each component was created as kind of a separate layer. And it can then be manipulated. When you scan the shoe all at once. You've got one layer is a picture right of that shoe. So again, there's there's different times when you want to do both, or when you want to do either, we actually, I would say at this point are probably 7030 70% being the you know, let's build it from scratch in 30% at least in regards to shoes, and about 30% are being scanned at this point.
Darius 9:35 Okay, this is very interesting. It i don't i want to move on to the other topics, but this almost reminds me of deep fakes. Is this how they make deep fakes.
John 9:47 There's very similar technology. Absolutely. Right. What they're doing is they're, they're isolating specific layers, you know, in a deep fake right. And, and they're manipulating those layers as they as they want, right. And so they're creating a digital layer on top of the physical layer on the real layer that was, you know, the video or the picture. That was that was originally taken and then and then they can, once they've created that digital layer, which takes time from an artist, right, then they can just start applying, hey, we want to look like Tom Cruise, we want to look like this person. Right. So. So being able to, to add that digital layer adds flexibility for future use.
Darius 10:25 Yeah, very interesting. Okay, let's move to the management side of the assets.
John 10:34 Yeah, you know, what we get most of the time these days is, when we first start working with a company is they'll send us a Google Drive, or a Dropbox or a SharePoint link or something like that. And it's just being, you know, they have a bunch of folders and files. And even if they have 3d content, it's all just sitting in some random cloud, you know, storage software that has absolutely zero capability of translating a viewing of really understanding these 3d files to the to the software, it's just, oh, hey, here's some random extension, I don't understand. 3d files require very specific viewers, and typically even need different viewers per platform, whether you're on a mobile device, or an iPad, or even a Mac versus a Windows computer, you're going to, you're going to need different software to view that content. And so that's obviously not ideal. And so what we do is when, when we first start working with a company, we will take all their stuff, and we'll upload it into seek studio, and that's where everything happens. That's where everything's managed. But there we've built in, it's a, it's a cloud based software, that allows people to, to quickly preview the content, because our, our software has the viewers built in. And so you can quickly Okay, I need them scanning through, oh, there's this shiny red because there's previews and, and ways to see the 3d model and spin it around and edit it and, and do a lot of manipulation to that content. So at its core, it's digital asset management, it's nothing too complicated, although there are a lot of features that our system has that that I think is really important to, to the, I think really both steps on either side of management, the ingestion, right the creation side, as well as the next step, which is, which is that deployment, for example, we have a 3d editor that is on the cloud, it's works right in your browser. And so you know, you've got this shoe that's been scanned or created, or this table or whatever it is that you're working with. And you can you can double click on it and seek studio and it opens up an editor. And you can start to adjust things like I was talking about a second ago with colors. But shoot, you can start to say, Hey, you know what, I want to change this, what does this look like, or maybe I can change, I can adjust the shyness of specific things, or I can change how metallic it looks or how plastic it looks. Or maybe I can, I can work on compressing the file a little bit better, maybe it's still too big. And one of the things I failed to mention that I think is very important on Nexus that kind of pulls it into the management side is 3d files are huge. They're just massive. When we receive 3d files created by brands and embedded companies, Lego is a great example, Lego will send us with complex 3d representation of one of their LEGO sets, that's all been put together. And the way that they built that is they'll take the little Lego pieces, the 3d Lego pieces, and they'll just build it inside of a program, right. And so think about how many little separate pieces there are in a Lego set where you've got, you know, 1200 pieces, or 5000 pieces. In some cases, we're talking about the Millennium Falcon, or no crazy things like that. And they'll just show up to us. And they're these files are 500 megabytes to gigabytes. They're, they're ridiculous. And so part of the process of ingestion, of bringing it in through Nexus and bringing it into studio is a very complex and sophisticated series of 3d pipelines that look at every single little element of this, the textures, and the materials and the number of vertices and number of triangles. And again, without getting too complicated, it looks at all of these different elements tied to that 3d model. And it optimizes them to be able to be used on all the different platforms that we're going to be pushing to in the next step. And, and so we can take a 500 megabyte Lego, you know, animated Lego set that they created, throw it through the Sikh pipeline, and it comes out the other side as seven megabytes, right. And now it can be published to a website and be published somewhere where somebody can actually view it and it's not going to use their entire data plan for the month trying to download this one model and they want to view it. So so the management side is is a lot of tools that help kind of whip these these models into shape. For for distribution, and and help brands just simply manage the content to be able to find it when they need
Darius 15:00 Okay, and then distribution is basically you provide your almost like an image warehouse, where they can link to using an API and displayed on their, like product detail page
John 15:16 a little bit. It's less of an image warehouse as more of a digital asset management because for example, you can't like Lego, for example, is the only one that can see Legos files, right? But then the next the next step is distribution piece is is looking at, okay, how do we how do we put this 3d model in front of the end user and 3d model? 3d models need to be viewed in in this? Well, there's so many places that the route really what I'm trying to say is there are so many places that this 3d model can be viewed today, and every single platform out there is working on their own way to view these models, right. So you have, you know, the obvious, you know, culprits, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, tik tok Pinterest, right? They all have their own kind of 3d formats and ways to do things and processes. And then you have the the basic, you know, things that should be there is, Hey, can we view this inside of can we can we put this functionality inside of our, our company app, our brand app, can we put this on our website? can we can we put QR codes on advertising materials, on posters on, you know, things that are going out in the mail, at, you know, at some conference where you want to have some sort of cool engagement, there's a lot of different ways to deploy that content. And so what our system does is, and this is really, this is really where seek starts to get really exciting is we can handle dozens of platforms. And in our system, if we were doing a screen share here, you would see dozens of different buttons inside of the system and on the distribution place. And the kind of the integrations page is what we call it where you say, Okay, I need a, I need a button on my website. All right, click here. And then our system comes up and says, alright, for this model, copy this code, paste it into website. And here's the instructions if you have any questions, but also it's all very self serve. And you can, you can do it with a button, you can do an image, you can use a QR code, you can deploy it to Snapchat, you can deploy it to Google, search and run Google 3d ads, you can deploy it to Facebook, and Instagram, or Shopify and, and I could go on the list goes on and on. But there's lots and lots of ways once that 3d model has been created, our system is automatically optimizing it and creating all of these different variations of that 3d model to be compatible with whatever target platform it's going towards. So it's a very flexible system that allows for, for not only the, you know, the current implementations that are there today, but as technology continues to improve, I think we'll talk about in a minute, you know, what's next, our system will just automatically add a new button to the system. Hey, now you can deploy over here, this is a new thing that's out, but your 3d model has automatically been converted, and it's ready for deployment on this new platform.
Darius 18:02 Yeah, well, that sounds really interesting. Yeah. Because I haven't worked with 3d models myself yet. I'm interested, actually. But I mean, I can know just even basic images, can be a challenge to manage across all the different platforms.
John 18:17 Yes. So absolutely.
Darius 18:20 Yeah. They're very interesting. So how do you how do you what what what does the pricing look like? Is it SAS? Or is it per trial? or? Yeah, there's
John 18:31 really two elements that come into play here. The first one is on the 3d model creation, right? Or sometimes optimization, sometimes brands have, you know, a CAD file or something like that. And they have some source file that that's still not ready for distribution, right? It needs some, it needs some work and some love to get to the place where it's going to be ready. So So usually, you'll pay, you know, a couple 100 bucks a model, sometimes even less than that, depending on the complexity of the model. And that will get the model into the system. Now, once once it's into the system. Yes, it's a SaaS model, the access to Nexus and seeedstudio, and the distribution and all of the different ways to deploy this content. And, you know, we're hosting it for the brand, they you know, they put up, they put a link on their on their website that that works and is embedded onto their website. So they don't actually have to leave the website to view it. But everything is ultimately hosted by seacon. So yes, there's a sass prize that goes that really scales with size of business, right? We work with some companies that literally have one product, and then we work with companies that literally have 50,000 products that are hosted through seek and so we really have built a system that can scale up and down in a great way.
Darius 19:42 Okay, so if I can ask about that a little bit more just to give, you know, people who listened to this later on, have an idea, the company that has one product, what would it be? Can you give me like an idea of what their costs would be?
John 20:00 You know, most of them that the people that are that are doing one product, they typically are a fairly high volume high consideration brand and others not selling a product that's just $20. Or if they are, they're selling a lot of it, it's typically like a barbecue grill or something like that anyway, but so it's going to be higher higher ticket items, typically. But when you have one product, our bait, if you go to our website, our base packages, I think 1499 a month, so 15 $100 a month, right, this is an enterprise level, with, we're the best system of its kind, right, we're a 3d control center. And that that is important even for one product, right, because even taking that one product and, and deploying it to all of these different platforms, and then being able to manage and view analytics and see what it's doing to everything, all of those little features are built in. And so it really is built for that sometimes we will go lower than that, depending on the you know, if it's a startup, or if it's a, you know, a newer company, and then we're like, Hey, we want to grow with you. And, you know, we'll we'll definitely work deals sometimes but but that lower end is typically going to start, you know, in our in our base package people I think we call our growth package. And then to just kind of jump to I think the next question if someone's, you know, 50,000 model that could be 40 5060 $100,000 a month, right? I mean, if you're, if you're talking really complex, you know, installations on multiple websites and insider proprietary apps and all those things, it could, it could be a full scale, but I think most companies fall, they typically start somewhere around 4k a month, and usually won't, won't go much above 15 to 20,000 a month, and that would be on the high end for most companies.
Darius 21:41 Okay. So, so this is probably not something that the average Shopify merchant would use this in the beginning until they actually start to scale up.
John 21:53 Yeah, yeah, definitely. We do actually have Shopify compatibility, we have an app in the Shopify store. But you're exactly right. There are cheaper options that are out there in the Shopify store. And they're a great place to start if you just have a couple products, and you only need to work on, you know, iOS, and just really basic things. But when you really start to get into, okay, I need to be seen, you know, analytics, and I need to be this needs to work on Android, it needs to work on iOS, it needs to work on older devices that might not support things we have. We have viewers and compatibility compatibility matrix that is far beyond what Shopify or other, you know, kind of smaller solutions similar to us provide that will allow for, you know, a global brand, for example, that that needs to make sure that, you know, all the phones in Russia and China are going to work on this too, right? We really are built to to deliver that, that more enterprise global type of solution. So there are I think on on Shopify, you can find things that will that will do a basic AR view for 30 bucks a month, I mean, really, really cheap, but they're not going to come with the product management are not going to come with Nexus, they're not going to come with the really complex, you know, deliverability? And so so yes, this is something that you probably grow into.
Darius 23:14 Okay, cool. So what are the I guess the performance metrics that you've seen with having the three models on a ecommerce? You know, product is the is the like a conversion? Much higher?
John 23:33 It's amazing how much higher it is. And it's not on every single Well, actually, let me let me say this anyway, every single product that we've ever put into the system and put up on a website has seen an improvement in conversion. There's different levels of that conversion, though, right? And the the number one category, as you might imagine, is furniture. Right? And you're shopping online for furniture. You always wonder right is this kitchen table going to fit is this desk going to fit in my new home office is this couch going to fit in my living room, what's this painting can look like on my wall is this 80 inch TV going to be too big in my bedroom. Being able to put things on the wall and put them in your space helps a huge amount. And so on the furniture side of things, we see the sales can sales lift. I think the highest we've actually measured is 179% increase in sales conversion. And that's on $30 million in sales that's on very significant numbers, but adding just millions and millions of dollars to to top line revenue as a result, sales conversion increases from I think in that specific version. In fact, I'll pull up the number right here I've got it on my computer here I've got the exact numbers, but in this specific example I won't share the name of the brand just to protect their privacy but with without AR you know when when someone went through the experience and didn't click on it or they didn't use it. The conversion rate was point three 6%. And this is again on on millions and millions of views. And then the conversion rate with AR was point nine 7%. So point 362 point nine, seven. That's pretty impressive.
Darius 25:18 Yeah, that's almost three times. Yeah. Yeah. That adds up.
John 25:24 Yeah. So that, as I said, 179. Before, it's 169% increase, right? Or, you know, 2.69 times. But the thing so, so yes, it makes a huge impact on that. And then a little bit harder metric that was the hardest takes longer to measure, right is his returns, right. And I've seen our own stats, we've measured internally as high as 25 30% reduction in returns, you know, when you see it, when you see in your space, you know, you're just more likely to see that, that difference happen. But we've seen other people I mean, Amazon, I think is reported something like 80% reduction in returns when people use AR and so they're trying to get AR on every single every single product they can possibly possibly imagine. But the the impact is real people spend longer on the site, they answer their questions more fully. And therefore they're, you know, they're more confident about their purchase, they'll buy it faster, and they'll return less.
Darius 26:22 So we unfortunately, have a hard slog, because I have another review book right after this one. This is very interesting. I mean, what's what are you looking at, for example, for the next evolution of seek?
John 26:39 Yeah, the next components that are coming out here are going to be related to better tracking, right, which means try on right to try on classes, try on, you know, the work right on the web, ring, try on, watch, try on, right, all of those different things. And so kind of moving more into the clothing sector is really exciting. We also have much more advanced analytics, and I know, analytics might not sound very sexy, but when I'm talking to brands, that's the thing that they hone in on our analytics, being able to really help drive business decisions is what, you know, that helps people grow, right. And we have companies that come to us, and they start with 100 products. And, and they you know, they do all the measurements, and because of our pretty advanced analytics already, they're able to quickly you know, within 30 days, see, okay, this is making a huge impact. How quickly can we jump to 1500 products to 3000 products? And we have some that say, hey, how do we get the 50,000 products? Right? Those are the big huge retailers that need to want to do this at scale, right. But when it's doubling their sales, conversion, or even increasing their sales conversion by 30%, right, that's significant today, that means if anybody wants to do that, right, and so and so we have a lot of kind of behind the scenes, things that will that will allow for brands to more quickly and more clearly see the impact on their on their business. And then, and then of course, you know, talking about the future a little bit, you've got things like Apple glasses, you have you know, snap glasses, google glasses, you have all these different companies that are coming out with wearables. And that's going to be the next kind of evolution, the next phase of this, of this augmented reality revolution. And that will be really exciting. We will support it all.
Darius 28:21 That's very exciting. Yeah, I'm actually I'll follow up with you maybe later on to talk about jewelry, because I'm interested to see how this could be. We have a brand that's in the jewelry business, and this could be interesting.
John 28:33 So yeah, that that Tryon stuff will be exciting for jewelry.
Darius 28:36 Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much, john. JOHN, it was a pleasure meeting you and speaking with you.
John 28:42 Absolutely. Thank you so much. There's
Darius 28:44 so this is the end of our conversation with john cheney from seek x are the interview will be recorded and put on the website at retail tech podcast.com. If you're interested to get notified when it's live, you can subscribe to the newsletter over there. Thank you so much for listening again and hope to see you at the next interview. Bye bye