Winston-Salem, NC — When the Culp Home Fashions division of Culp, Inc. turned to the imagine.io platform three years ago, executives hoped to elevate their business with superior high-resolution imagery and potentially streamline their time to market with new mattress fabric designs. What they didn’t expect was that the imagine.io platform would also reduce production hours and sampling costs.
Culp Brand Experience Manager Holly Fulton, who helps handle creative direction for the company’s top bedding accounts, said that digital prototypes she and her team create in the technology platform are now regularly being used by those mattress manufacturers in presentations to their dealers to gauge consumer reaction about potential designs before a product ever hits the marketplace or a finished fabric ever leaves a production machine.
“Culp is one of the most progressive companies I have ever done business with, and they have harnessed the imagine.io platform to transform their mattress fabric business,” said imagine.io CEO Preet Sahil Singh. “They are maximizing the value of visualization and image production from initial design and rapid digital prototyping all the way through the life cycles of their products.”
“Not that long ago, salespeople leaving our offices for a business trip could barely get out the door because of the huge bags of fabric samples they had to carry,” said Forrest Buck, Vice President of IT at Culp. “Even then, whenever we had to travel, we had to send additional boxes ahead to our destination because we couldn’t check enough bags.”
“Now, using the imagine.io platform, we have more customers coming to us to drive early innovation concepts,” Fulton said. “Customers are more apt to work with us in real time and the entire process has become so much more collaborative and efficient for everybody concerned.”
Indeed, “it used to take much longer for one of our major customers to develop new product and get images prepared to show a retailer. We’d start by showing them renderings, which they would then begin to cut down to smaller groups and final selections. Previously, we had to physically knit all our samples to show customers. If there were new yarns or raw materials involved, it could take as much as six more weeks to produce the physical fabric samples for their review. Digital prototyping has cut weeks and sometimes months from the cycle. It’s made us a much greener company overall because our salespeople can quickly share digital images, and the feedback from our customers has been tremendous.”
“Think about the fact that on any given mattress there are as many as five different places where fabrics can be applied,” Singh said. “That means there are thousands of potential combinations. In the past, it was impossible to iterate more than a fraction of those out, whereas digitally, Culp can create and show as many combinations as they wish using the 360-degree product configurators that we built for them.”
“Preet took the time to understand what our requirements were and to truly understand our business,” Buck said. “Prime examples of that involved specifying the direction of the fabric patterns and the widths along with the ability to interface with our ERP system.”
Products are shown in fully accessorized lifestyle images and videos, leaving the team more time than ever to flex their creative muscles. “Prior to working with imagine.io, we had a Photoshop guru on our team who used to hand-build all of our mattress renderings,” Fulton said. “It would take three to five days for her to produce one image in Photoshop, with the right lighting and shadows, puckering the fabric on the mattress to make it appear as though there was quilting. Today she has a different role: She is a full-time fabric designer, innovating and creating winning designs for some of our largest customers.”
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