Running a pilot

Six steps, two weeks, a case your team can't ignore

A pilot is the fastest way to build evidence for Furniture Connect. Here's how to run one.

Pick your products

Choose a range that carries weight in the business and feels imaging friction most. Good signals:

Products that have waited weeks for lifestyle imagery
Ranges that rely on white-background cutouts or CAD renders
New arrivals that need to go live on several channels at once
Products where a studio shoot has been quoted but not booked

Ten to 30 products is ideal — large enough to test batch processing and the Agentic Catalog, small enough to finish in two weeks.

Measure your baseline

Six numbers, captured before you start

Before the team touches Furniture Connect, capture the current state. It gives you a baseline and surfaces the pain the pilot has to address.

Time to market

Days from product-ready to a live listing with lifestyle imagery.

Cost per image

What one styled lifestyle image costs through the current process.

Image consistency

Whether product images look the same across every channel.

Team satisfaction

How the ecommerce and marketing team rate the imaging process, one to five.

Conversion rate

Listings with lifestyle imagery against listings without.

Backlog

Products currently live without lifestyle imagery.

Set up Furniture Connect

Upload your product images to Studio to start generating lifestyle imagery. Use the Agentic Catalog to import your product data — ZIP files, folder structures or CSV. Everything you do here carries over to full production, so nothing is wasted.

If you need help with setup, the team is hands-on. Customers consistently mention how responsive support is — NOIR called it “extraordinarily fast.”

Run the pilot

Give the team two to four weeks. Use Furniture Connect as the primary imaging tool for the pilot products — don’t split between tools. Workflows to test:

Single image generation — upload a product photo, generate a styled room scene, compare it to your current imagery.
Batch processing — upload a whole collection and generate at scale.
Product highlights and carousels — annotated feature callouts and multi-image sets.
Agentic Catalog — import product data, attach the generated images, export ready-to-publish listings.
Background removal and upscaling — clean up existing images to 4K.

Measure the results

Compare against step 2, side by side

Revisit the baseline. Compare time to market, cost per image, team satisfaction and image quality side by side.

For context, the numbers other brands measured after switching are in the band below — 30% higher sales conversions, roughly half the time to market, and a 10/10 would-recommend score.

Present your case

Decision-makers don’t sift through anecdotes. Pull four or five quantitative comparisons between baseline and pilot, put them side by side, and pair each metric with a before-and-after image.

Your internal data tells one story; the customer stories below tell the external one. Once you have buy-in, the migration guide covers the move.