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PRODUCTS CGI MARKETING
SHOOT OUT From time and money savings to unparalleled flexibility, there are many reasons to embrace CGI marketing – yet some still cannot appreciate how doing so could benefit their business, says Chilli Pepper Designs’ Neil BuckleyJensen, offering his candid take on what the new approach means to him as a furniture manufacturer … www.chillipepperdesigns.co.uk
CGI by Chilli Pepper Designs
I KNEW WHAT I WANTED FROM CGI, AND IT SEEMED NO OTHER COMPANY COULD DELIVER IT
When did you first encounter CGI in the furniture industry, and how did you go on to use it in your own business? When we started out in the furniture world around 10 years ago with Little Tree Furniture, we used a PR company to help build our brand. Our problem was that we had no real imagery for our products for marketing purposes. Our PR company suggested we look into CGI, and that’s what we did. It was actually quite poor quality back then, and unbelievably expensive, so we abandoned that idea and started to do the traditional photoshoot, which was incredibly time-consuming and quite an expense. I personally never looked forward to the hassle of setting the shoots up and the time they took to co-ordinate – all that lifting and shifting furniture is hard work, and I’ve always had better things to be doing with my time (which could be far more productive for our business). Ten years on, Indesign Furniture (our parent company) had no chance
of getting any photography done at all during the first lockdown because of social distancing, etc, and I recalled the CGI conversation with our PR company and thought we should revisit the idea. The technology had clearly moved on since 10 years ago, but, depending which CGI companies you contact, the price can still be quite high, and quality not so good. We tried some companies in China, Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the US and UK, and each company we tried always had an issue – whether it would be cost, time spent making the models and roomset, us having to be overly involved, or the CGI artists just not understanding our brand. So, I set our own sister company up, called Chilli Pepper Designs, because I knew what I wanted from CGI, and it seemed no other company could deliver it. Since setting it up, we have never looked back, and we have better imagery than ever at a fraction of the cost and time it took to set up traditional photoshoots.
