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Walk into almost any furniture store, and you’ll enter a multi-brand world: a sofa from one, a dining table from another, lighting and accessories from others. The list goes on. Instead of being limited by what fits into a physical showroom, what if retailers could give their customers instant access to up-to-date digital catalogs for all their brands, including items not yet on display or held in stock? That’s where a single, multi-brand visualization and configuration platform comes in.
“Ordering and tracking a multi-brand order across multiple systems is not a very smooth or efficient process.”
– David Colijn, iONE360 Product Manager, Colijn IT
Why multiple systems hold back sales
The challenge for furniture retailers is how to smoothly handle orders containing multiple configurable products from different brands. Many juggle several systems at once. They might have various product configurators, maybe a standalone room planner, even manual drawings on paper with fabric swatches on top. This kind of fragmentation creates friction at every step:
– Different interfaces for each brand mean longer onboarding and more mistakes.
– Products can’t be easily combined if they live in separate tools.
– Orders may have to be split across multiple systems, then manually reassembled.
From an operational perspective, things get messy fast, especially when most customer orders are naturally multi-brand. The sales rep ends up placing one part of the order in System A, another in System B, then manually keying everything into the ERP or order system. It’s time-consuming, error-prone, and frustrating for both staff and customers.
Making the case for multi-brand visualization
When you think about it, a single, multi-brand visualization and configuration platform mirrors the way retailers in the physical world already do business. But it also goes much further. Customers rarely come in to buy ‘just a sofa’.
More often than not, customers are trying to furnish a whole room, which leaves the door wide open to cross-selling and upselling. For example, a living room might start with a sofa, but other items soon present themselves: a recliner, a coffee table, maybe a rug and lighting. Being able to configure and visualize that full set together answers several big questions at once:
– Does it look good together in terms of style, colors, and materials?
– Will it fit in terms of dimensions and room layout?
–Does it work with what they already have in terms of floors, walls, and other items?
When those questions are answered visually, decision-making speeds up. Faster decisions almost always mean higher conversion rates, because you’re removing doubt instead of giving customers weeks to second-guess themselves at home.
Opening the door to guided selling
Retailers have long seen that what’s styled on the shop floor heavily influences what sells. A multi-brand room planner lets you recreate that effect digitally: only with far more versatility than any showroom could offer.
Multi-brand visualization creates room for guided selling: suggesting higher-value options or complementary pieces as you build the room on screen. It’s the digital equivalent of a beautifully styled showroom, but with unlimited combinations.
The persuasive power of one platform
With iONE360’s multi-brand room planner and 3D configurator, a sales associate can quickly combine a chair from brand X in the perfect fabric with a table from brand Y in the right size and finish, and place them together in a realistic setting.
This isn’t just a nice-to-have visual. It’s a powerful decision-making tool. A customer’s mixed-brand basket can be converted into correct production and purchase data in one go, then tracked as a single order all the way to delivery.
That’s because iONE360 is ‘ERP-born’. It closes the gap between sales, orders, and manufacturing. The same platform that handles beautiful multi-brand visualization also generates clean, usable data: Bills of Materials, item codes, and configuration rules that align with your existing ERP.
For retailers and their sales teams, the real power of one isn’t just about having one interface on the shop floor. It’s about having one connected system from first inspiration to final order, across all brands:
-One multi-brand experience for the customer
-One tool for the sales team to learn and love
-One data backbone that speaks your ERP’s language
That’s how you turn the complexity of multi-brand retail into a simple, confident buying experience and into more profitable, efficient sales.