Poplar Studio is the leading AR and 3D platform for marketing and eCommerce. Our project management tools and talent cloud make it easy for brands and retailers to create and deploy AR and 3D experiences across all channels.
We take any brand asset or product, build them quickly into 3D and AR, and deploy them into social and e-commerce platforms.
- AR Marketing: we build brand awareness and engage with targeted audiences on social and the web with interactive AR and 3D campaigns.
- AR Commerce: we increase conversions and reduce returns by empowering customers to visualise products in 3D and try on products through AR.
Launched in September 2018, Poplar Studio has already worked with hundreds of top international brands across sectors: L'Oréal, Nestlé, the BBC, Speedo, Universal, J&J, Disney, Made.com, GSK, PepsiCo, Warner Music, Bacardi, and Maybelline, among many others.
Thanks to our unique tech partnerships, we can build once and deploy across all platforms:
- Marketing: we are a Trusted AR Partner of TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and Google (for 3D ads).
- Commerce: we are Integration Partners with Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Wix, Magento and Webflow, but we can deploy directly into a merchant's website too.
Why Poplar Studio and why 3D/AR?
- We work with any available asset. A merchant just has to upload a 2D picture through our CMS, and we'll turn around a 3D model of their product quickly -> all thanks to our talent cloud (the largest community of 2,000+ global 3D/AR creators). We are disrupting the traditional agency and studio model, thanks to our platform and community, making 3D and AR content creation simple, affordable and quick (ie scalable).
- Our product visualisation unit is easy to deploy, with one line of script on any website, or directly through an e-commerce site like Shopify.
- The merchant gets all the data on how the product is visualised in 3D or AR by the end customer, through our analytics (including how product hotspots are interacted with).
- 3D/AR product visualisation is proven to increase sales conversion, to increase engagement with the product and brand, to increase brand loyalty through innovation, and importantly to decrease returns. 60% of shoppers say they want to see products online in 3D and AR. Furthermore, they are willing to pay up to 20% more to get it. The ROI is there. Putting a 3D configurator on a brand’s website has helped some brands to realize an immediate 30% increase in conversion and a 50% reduction in returns by implementing interactive 3D visuals.
- In the end, 3D/AR visualisation is also environmentally-friendly, since it saves a trip to the store, as consumers can try on and visualise products at home.
We are already commercializing our platform, since we've generated £400,000 in 2020, and are projecting £1M in revenue in 2021.
Beyond Marketing and eCommerce, Poplar Studio is also experimenting with the creation of an AR template marketplace for education:
Essentially, we would provide a platform for schools, teachers, parents and students to create their own no-code AR experiences. For e.g. imagine 3D/AR planets, pyramids of Egypt, underwater scenes, human anatomy interactions, molecules, etc. These experiences would be published and available through web browsers, so they’d be accessible to anyone with any kind of mobile phone, tablet or even desktop (you would place the scene in 3D in front of your computer scene in that case, rather than in your environment using AR). This is more accessible than most experiences on the market which require app downloads.
On the supply side, our leading 3D and AR creator community of 2k+ members will be able to produce some of the 3D animated models and make them available through our template platform or create a whole complete template themselves. The creators would earn royalties from uses of their models (on a pro-rata basis), or from the license of their whole template (something like 70/30). Licensing a template for schools, teachers, parents or students could be as low as £5 per templatised experience. Some of the template elements will be customisable by clients (name, text, voice-over, etc.).
So we believe that we are hitting all 5 factors outlined in your criteria.
Winning an award would mean the world to us: to our amazing team who is working hard (and has worked twice as hard in difficult market conditions due to Covid), to our clients and investors who are trusting us, and it would help us validate that we are on the right track.
