The Shopper Agency

The Customer

The Shopper Agency are a shopper consultancy based in Amsterdam, NL with a mission to aid global brands and retailers by continuously evaluating and transforming their shoppers’ experience. They provide a full-service retail experience consultancy, offering behavioural insights, shopper marketing and retail design.

Six years ago, when Hans Smith started The Shopper Agency, their focus was on category management. After just one year in trade, they were contracted to transform the in-store experience of a Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) giant, and knew they had a challenge to rise to.

The Challenge

The CPG client that contracted them operates in over one hundred countries and faced a significant potential cost for an in-store design overhaul on such a scale. As a result, they required a collaborative solution that could centralise their POS materials and implement an efficient design process without causing unnecessary disruption.

Above and beyond this, the client desired the potential to effectively envisage and experience new concepts before production. The benefit of which was a reduction in risk and, consequentially, cost, by way of testing in a virtual environment. After an initial discovery process, The Shopper Agency resolved that Dassault Systèmes’ Perfect Store package, powered by the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, was the ideal solution for their in-store experience and enlisted TECHNIA as the perfect partner.

The Solution

Perfect Store has the capability to digitally edit a single shelf, a gondola or even a complete store layout as a 3D rendering before the design goes to production. The software also offers a completely cloud-based, desktop solution that works as a collaborative management tool for all their shelf display and assortment designs. And, most pertinently, Perfect Store features an integrated virtual reality environment wherein a customer can explore a proposed store experience.

“The magic of Perfect Store is that it’s so easy to get up and running and is incredibly easy for customers to get to grips with. For customers, you simply log in with no IT involvement at all – it’s that easy.”- Hans Smith, Founder of The Shopper Agency.

Perfect Store’s community-based way of working, similar to social media interfaces such as LinkedIn and Facebook, is so familiar to most users that its functionality is essentially second nature.

“Perfect Store lets you start out with an idea on how the store should look, then you move onto the creation of a 2D plan, and then onto 3D, which is the virtual environment – i.e. the really fun part!” – Hans Smith, Founder of The Shopper Agency.

The Result

At this stage, the customer’s team members were able to move through the store at their leisure using a joystick and virtual reality capabilities. With teams from all the designated countries and areas able to easily dial in, they were able to go from the initial concept to finished product in only two weeks.

This collaborative method of working resulted in a tremendous saving of time, overall cost and human effort, with the package design team, retailers, internal teams, field sales force, trademark divisions and brand management teams all able to communicate globally in real time.