New Company, Epistyle.com Changes Perspectives Toward Online Merchandising

Furniture World Magazine

As more and more companies expand their businesses to include Internet marketing, their agencies and web developers are looking for innovative ways to present their products online. Epistyle.com, a new company based in High Point, N.C., meets these needs with several exciting technologies to visually present furniture, home furnishings and apparel online. Using Epistyle.com is a cost-effective way for online retailers and the companies that service them, including advertising agencies, web developers and marketing consultants, to add pizzazz to the visual merchandising of products online. "Our mission is to be the one-stop source for innovative visual merchandising services," says CEO Don White. "Epistyle will create the visual content that helps online shoppers make more educated choices, feel more confident with their purchases and have more fun shopping. We see a big demand for this kind of content." Epistyle.com offers a number of services to enhance the visual presentation of products on manufacturer and retailer Internet sites and serves as a one-stop studio for this innovative visual content. The company not only creates the content, but also will maintain the content. "We expect the demand for online visual content to grow as manufacturers rely more on the Internet and adopt web browsers as the presentation tool of choice," said White. Among Epistyle.com's services is digital pattern draping, which enables online retailers to show images of an item of furniture or apparel in all the various fabrics and patterns available for each item. Epistyle.com starts with a photograph of the item in the original fabric and digitally edits the image in the computer to "digitally drape" each new fabric onto the product in the original photographic image. This allows the viewer to see how the item will look with the new fabric. "The quality of the finished draped images is so good," says President Scott Davis, "that many people cannot tell which is the original image and which has been draped with new fabric patterns." To prove their point, Epistyle.com is offering a Sweepstakes on their web site at www.epistyle.com, which offers $50,000 in free services to the companies of people who can identify the original images. In addition to digital draping, Epistyle.com offers digital 3-D modeling. This technology allows the online shopper to move the merchandise around an online room and zoom in and out to examine the details of an item form all angles. Digital 3-D models can even show how the functional parts of an item move. Online shoppers find the 3-D models help them see details that a single image may not reveal. Plus, it makes online shopping fun. For online home furnishings retailers who want to merchandise their furniture and accessories in different room settings, Epistyle.com can create entire rooms digitally in 3-D graphics around a photographic image of a set of furniture. "Our goal is to make the digital room 'photo real,' in other words, as close to reality as possible," says Davis. "With digital room sets, the retailer's options for the room style and architectural features are unlimited." For more information, visit the web site at www.epistyle.com.