Natuzzi crafts amazing customer experiences with Microsoft mixed reality technologies

By Pasquale Junior Natuzzi, Creative Director and Stylist at Natuzzi

Bringing the spirit of the Mediterranean to the whole world

Living and working in the Apulia region in southeastern Italy, we don’t have to look far for inspiration. We strive to bring the surrounding beauty and the relaxed spirit of the Mediterranean lifestyle into all of our products. My father, Pasquale Natuzzi, founded our company in 1959, and our unique combination of innovative design and functionality has made us the successful luxury brand we represent today.

Our commitment to excellence extends to all aspects of the supply chain and production. From research and development through materials procurement to leather tanning, woodworking, and sewing, everything is made within Natuzzi by amazing artisans. We dream about beautiful furniture and work together to bring it to life. This helps us deliver on our promise of quality and style. We take this same approach to our in-store and online shopping experiences—we want to surprise and delight our customers and help them enjoy the process of buying Natuzzi furniture.

Although our furniture is made and sold in Italy, 90 percent of our business comes from abroad. We are truly a global brand, so it’s important that we take an international view of markets and consumption and facilitate that joyful purchase experience for customers everywhere. Natuzzi is more than just a set of products—it’s a lifestyle built around the Apulian aesthetic and a level of perfection in every aspect.

In the 1970s, my father reinvigorated the market for furniture by focusing on comfort and bringing out new shapes, designs, and colors. The industry at the time favored monochrome colors, with lots of blacks and browns. Natuzzi disrupted this traditional palette with a broad spectrum of colored leathers—pink and yellow and green—and this was a key driver for our brand going viral and gaining global traction through the 70s and 80s. This traction has continued, and today our stores stretch from Seoul to New York to Milan to Miami.

Marrying furniture with technology for stellar customer experiences

We also see ourselves as pioneers in the area of marrying furniture with technology—we were one of the first companies to sell sofas with integrated audio systems, for example. Our current Re-vive recliner has 125 parts and brings together ergonomic design that intuitively responds to the body’s movements. Last year we introduced our first smart sofa that is completely controlled by AI and voice, and it can interact with other smart devices like the TV, lights, and audio systems. Through programmable presets, you can say, “Hey, sofa, I want to read a book,” and the lights come up, the TV shuts off, and the seat reclines to your preferred reading position.

Consumers are bombarded with brand messaging through all sorts of online and physical channels in our hyperactive world, so it’s important that we find unique ways to present our products and value proposition to customers. We use technology to help tell the Natuzzi story and create a one-to-one relationship with consumers so they will join the Natuzzi family and keep coming back. This includes technology designed to enhance the browsing and purchase experience. With our 3D Interior Design Configurator application, for example, consumers mix and match furniture in a mockup floor plan of their space for a realistic visualization of what the room will look like with the chosen products. And by using technology that is invisible to the consumer, like our plan to deploy Microsoft Dynamics 365 customer relationship management (CRM) software, we can track the purchase journey and integrate with our loyalty management department.

An exciting new development for us is our first venture into mixed reality. Consumers put on a headset and interact with spaces and furniture—shifting products around, changing patterns and colors, and moving through the space to gain a full-range view of what a room could look like with their favorite Natuzzi furniture. It gives them a sense of place and mood that’s almost as real as a physical furniture display and helps them make an emotional connection with the pieces.

Before a customer even comes into the store, we talk to them about their home and begin to render the spaces with our configuration tools and product library. Then, when the customer arrives, they don’t need to walk through aisles of similar products—instead, they have a very fun and experiential tour of their own home with a selection of fine Natuzzi furniture. We want them to know that we are a sophisticated company that is an industry leader in both design and presentation.

We’ve introduced the augmented store into some of our retail locations, and we’re using it with the Microsoft HoloLens 2 headset. The reaction from customers has been mind-blowing—it brings such intricate detail to the 3D simulations that they fall in love with products they didn’t even know they wanted to buy. With the power of Microsoft cloud solutions, I feel like there’s nothing we can’t do with HoloLens.

Envisioning the store of the future and gaining deep data insights

We’ve always taken pride in keeping our entire inventory in stock across our catalog, but it isn’t possible to make every piece available in every store. For immediate purchases, customers were limited to what was stocked at that particular store, and other pieces needed to be transported from a different location. With mixed reality, we have a vision for a new type of store where customers can see and interact with any item in our catalog. This is wonderful for customers, but also wonderful for Natuzzi, because now we can effectively have limitless inventory in every store. This is not just a tremendous convenience, but also a tremendous source of cost savings because we don’t have to build and maintain inventory in every retail outlet or try to predict which items would be best for each one. The stores can still have samples to give people the tactile experience of fabrics and finishings, but the space needed to store those is just a small fraction of complete furniture sets.

To make our new augmented store a seamless and enjoyable experience for customers, we wanted to make sure we put best-in-class technology behind it. As part of creating our 3D Product Configurator, we worked with Microsoft Azure cloud services, which make it easy for a global brand like ours to build out, maintain, and update a virtual product library. Natuzzi is an industry leader, and Microsoft is an industry leader, so pairing together on this project was a logical decision. We also worked with Microsoft Mixed Reality Partner Hevolus, a furniture and retail specialist that was one of the first Italian companies to receive a Microsoft accreditation for mixed reality. The Apulian spirit infuses every aspect of this project!

By choosing Azure, we gained access to more than just an industry-leading cloud platform with the speed, flexibility, and security we want—we’re also able to take advantage of the many technology tools and services that are part of the Azure offering. Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services is at the heart of our solution. With this set of services, we provide an intelligent, interactive experience through our augmented store. We also rely on Azure Storage capabilities and Azure Virtual Machines, and we bring the experience to life with the mixed reality applications from Dynamics 365. We trust that the support for mixed reality in Dynamics 365 will continue to grow as we expand the features of our augmented store.

Because we have introduced so much new technology into our customer journey, we are in a position to gather more data about that journey than we have in the past. We use Microsoft Power BI to help make sense of that data and maintain a single source of truth. With Power BI, we can gather and visualize information to gain deep insights on inventory and customer behavior to make even better business decisions.

Dramatically increasing dollar-per-square-foot performance with intelligent tools

We refer to the combined product of all this technology as the Natuzzi New Customer Experience, and we’re proud to offer our customers a way to experience things that were previously unimaginable. We’re also proud of the opportunity this presents for our employees to have a more stimulating and fulfilling work experience. How exciting is it to be able to take customers on a journey into a virtual world where there are no boundaries and anything is possible?

The augmented store is clearly a win for Natuzzi in terms of customer relationships, and we expect that it will shorten the time it takes for purchase decisions by one-third and increase the conversion rate from shopping to buying by one-third. The use of mixed reality also has the potential to positively impact the process of opening new stores. We would love to be able to increase our retail footprint in busy downtown shopping areas, high streets, and fashion districts, but these in-demand spots are typically smaller and more expensive than other locations. So being able to open a tiny boutique store with unlimited virtual inventory is an excellent way to facilitate spreading our brand promise to a wider audience.

As Natuzzi celebrates its sixtieth anniversary of Apulian-inspired design excellence, we look forward to bringing our celebration of local landscapes and scenery into cyberspace through our work with Microsoft technologies. The possibilities of mixed reality are endless, and we will continue to explore and push the boundaries to make our customers fall in love with Natuzzi and spread our passion for fine furniture to all corners of the world.

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