Interviews

How Flipspaces is causing a disruption in the interior design space leveraging modern tech tools like AR &VR

An overview of the company, its recent projects executed in India and U.S

Flipspaces is a leading global interior design-tech venture which was founded by Kunal Sharma and Ankur Muchhal in 2015. Its current presence is spread across 12 cities worldwide having offices in cities including but not limited to  Mumbai, Bangalore, Ahmedabad and New York (USA).

It uses its multi-module technology stack called VIZWORLD to bridge the gaps in the customer experience journey pertaining to the interior designing, associated product and services supply and the project execution industry. While solving various tangible issues faced by different stakeholders in the value-chain through its proprietary technology suite, it is redefining the way commercial interior design and build industry operates.

With over 6+ million sft. of delivered space across almost all commercial real estate categories, it has become the de facto choice of turnkey design and execution brand for start-ups, coworking, retail, corporates and F&B players. They’ve catered to commercial spaces globally for renowned companies such as BSH, NoBroker, Open Financial, Times Group, Aditya Birla,  InstaOffice, BharatPe, Nivea, Oppo, P&G, Reebok, Royal Enfield, Razorpay,  Bounce and PlaySimpleGames in India and the US. The recently executed projects include Route Mobile, Octillion Power Systems, Solaris, Big Box Ventures & AECC Global to name a few. Mr. Kunal Sharma – Founder & CEO- Flipspaces shares more insights on the same.

 

How technology has been a gamechanger in redefining the interior design space especially workspaces post the pandemic

The issue of the commercial interior design industry being fragmented is resolved by the implementation of a centralized digital platform such as VIZWORLD by Flipspaces that can provide multiple services to businesses on an unified interface.

For designing commercial interiors, a company is required to deal with the designers, suppliers, dealers of furniture articles and furnishings, and many more. Things can get really complicated if you are not able to bring everyone on the same page.

To solve this problem, businesses now prefer obtaining comprehensive one stop interior design services from interior design and build firms that use proprietary platforms of their own to design and execute the builds of commercial workspaces. These centralized platforms such as VIZWORLD in this case allow businesses to avail themselves of a range of different services without approaching different entities. Using technology to organize the services offered in the commercial interior design space helps companies save their valuable time, effort, and money in giving the right aesthetic appeal to their workspaces.

 

How Tech driven tools like AR & VR help the company take  a competitive edge in the market.

Businesses are switching to experiential platforms for purchasing articles like furniture and furnishings instead of making on-premise visits. This has been an increasing trend since the pandemic, where a lot of stores were closed for business and consumers were exposed to a lot more online shopping than ever before.  The furniture and furnishing dealers and designers also prefer setting up virtual stores at a fraction of a cost instead of spending a fortune building physical stores.

Such experiential platforms like VIZSTORE allow service providers to make their stores travel wherever they go, without the need to worry about physical real estate. Here, a store can occupy a vast space for accommodating hundreds of thousands of different designs and articles. While dealing with the customers, suitable designs and articles can be displayed as per their needs and preferences at the click of a button.

With VIZSTORE, Commercial interior designers can also provide immersive demos  via walkthroughs of their designs to their customers without the need for them to visit physical stores. This way, business customers have more options to choose from and see how the designs/articles would look after installation.

What VIZSTORE does is to help you visualize specific sections and design elements of commercial interiors simply by overlaying them onto the existing areas. This makes it simple for you to visualize how a dedicated section of your workspace would look with a particular design and furnishing articles.

The key differentiator between us at Flipspaces and other competitors is that we’ve got our own proprietary tech which no other competitor has.  For us at Flipspaces, technology is the way of life. What VIZWORLD – our proprietary tech offers is bringing in new age ideas and designs to life while having the necessary supply chain templates to create client delight at a level of scale.

Within the VIZWORLD platform comes a stack of services such as VIZCART, which is an online product portal of Flipspaces which has a curated product range of over 200,000 SKUs. Next comes VIZWALK which is an automated space visualization and our  in-house execution management platform called VIZDOM which has its host of benefits such as – it mitigates time and cost over-run coupled with managing a scalable operation and better customer experience.

 

How do you see technologies like AR & VR aiding in bolstering customer experience?

The application of technologies like VR and AR can also be extended to offer virtual walkthroughs to clients willing to design commercial interior workspaces and other commercial spaces with the help of VIZWALK which is a part of the tech stack in VIZWORLD. These walkthroughs with VIZWALK immerses you into the virtual world and helps you visualize how your commercial space would look after being designed.

VIZWALK which is an automated space visualization where one can input the products from Vizcart in a layout prepared by a designer and then give a photorealistic 3D walkthrough of the space. What’s unique is that a client can change finishes in real time during the walkthrough. Finally comes the in-house execution management platform called VIZDOM which has its host of benefits such as it mitigates time and cost over-run coupled with managing a scalable operation and better customer experience.

With VIZWORLD, our proprietary tech-suite of Flipspaces, we’re looking to create one integrated product which creates efficiency and customer delight in each step of this process. Interior design and build is fairly complex and requires deep domain expertise which can consequently create the ability to develop SAAS products for respective verticals. This is where the design and build pedigree creates substantial leverage for us as a firm.

We’ve also launched VIZTOWN, a leading prop-tech solution for developers which is a one-stop platform to fast-tracking leasing of commercial spaces with space planning, interior visualization and execution. Here we assist builders and brokers to lease their properties faster by creating a futuristic vision with the help of layouts, design and 3-D walkthroughs of their bare shell properties  which in turn enables their end client to plan their space and make quicker business decisions

 

What was the vision behind coming out with Vizstore

Vizstore is a virtual store which allows furniture and furnishing product owners to digitise the product display, visualisation, and selection experience using virtual reality technology. The idea, which struck us as a team, was way back in 2016. The focus was towards solving the retailers’ and manufacturers’ limitation of not being able to showcase their products effectively in their limited physical showroom space.

So reimagining interior design with technology, VIZSTORE – was the first SaaS product from us as a firm using our tech stack for third-party furniture and furnishing brands.Our  vision is to become the Integrated Operating System for the furniture and furnishing industry. Today, the core monetisation of Vizstore is a subscription-based model, and we’re looking to add more layers of monetisation by adding other business toolkit features along with a fintech layer on it in the future.

The team is currently working day in and out to upgrade the software, with multiple features having been added to the SaaS offering in the last few months – catalog distribution feature, quotation and invoice management feature, and store analytics, to name a few. This is in line with our vision of becoming the de facto FnF retailing software.

 

What are the challenges that the retail & furnishing industry is facing today? How does Vizstore help in combating these issues

The fundamental reason for the first level success of VIZSTORE is that in a showcase heavy category such as the furniture and the furnishing industry, VIZSTORE promises to help retailers showcase their entire range of products easily and with infinite possibilities of real-life environments for visual merchandising. This makes sales easier for a store owner. Additionally, the software also has the ability to provide analytics to store owners about the products that have been chosen by consumers and helps retailers understand the kind of consumers they are catering to along with their behaviour.

The catalog distribution feature for example, allows retailers to find a digital alternative to physical distribution of catalogs. It allows them to share the experience of a walkthrough of their actual physical store for any remote customer by generating a customer specific shortlink. This distribution can be further granularized into per catalogue per day.

Another model which we’ve worked on named Easy Quotes allows retailers to create a default quotation and invoice management system. This allows store owners to do better financial analytics, because VIZSTORE allows them to pick an SKU, and the quantity and prices are already entered into the backend system, along with the customer data. This makes it easier for retailers to generate an invoice and send it via email to customers, all of which happens at the click of a button.

 

So far, how many retail furnishing stores are using Viztore and what is the aim for the next 5 years

Currently we’ve empaneled over 500+ paying stores on the VIZSTORE Platform in a micro market validation for the product. Within the next 5 years we have set ourselves the goal of reaching to 30,000 counters using our platform.

 

What is the  growth roadmap for Flipspaces going forward

With the help of our integrated technology stack, our sole vision is of becoming the biggest global design-tech brand by weaving the three disjointed aspects of design, product and delivery experience with one integrated technology suite. With increased impetus on technology, we are getting closer to the vision of becoming a house of SAAS products after they have been used and tested for internal enablement. Each of these products with the Vizworld technology suite are first created and tested in-house, in order to drive organisational efficiency in our own design and build verticals. Subsequently, the vision is to roll them out as SAAS offerings for third party stakeholders. In the same light, our first such SAAS offering, Vizstore, is seeing a phenomenal response in the furniture and furnishing retail market

 

 

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