Kate

Visualize car options from any angle

Configure in real-time 3D

Order your custom product online

Kate & Emersya, a disruptive partnership!

Discover how this ambitious project was brought to life with the help of Emersya’s Interactive 3D for product visualization and customization.

Interview with

François Jaguelin

Product Manager at Nosmoke, now Kate

Challenges

Present interactive 3D visuals with unlimited viewpoints and high quality close-ups of the materials for thousands of different configurations of the product

Link the configuration to the ecommerce CMS & ERP to invoice the deposit & to manufacture the custom product

Enable customers to switch between all available product options, colors & materials in one seamless 360° product experience

Deliver premium customization experiences across all sales channels & empower distributors and partners to generate sales autonomously

Offer the possibility to save the customized version of the product to share on social media and replay the configuration

An Electric Classic Car, Direct to Consumer & Made to Order!

In 2012, Luc Jaguelin, founder of Nosmoke, had a dream: to raise from the ashes a vintage-looking, quintessential vehicle and transform it for modern, sustainable living by adding an electric motor! The Mini moke is a small utility and recreational convertible from the 1960’s. It soon became a cultural icon and, particularly in France, became synonymous with summer holidays and trips to the beach. In just 2 years, Nosmoke managed to relocate the R&D and production of the electric Mini Moke to France, specifically in the central-west region of Deux-Sèvres to capitalize on the local expertise. In 2015, Nosmoke launched their high-end yet sturdy and reliable beach buggy, exclusively direct-to-consumer and made to order. They set up a simple online customizer that enabled customers to choose their preferred colors and options.

Nosmoke became Kate in early 2023 when a group of investors (Thibaud Elzière, Matthias Goldenberg, Pierre Escrieut) took a majority stake in the company. With their background in the Tech and Automobile industries, the new management team had great ambitions for the commercial development of the company. Kate has already begun the development of their new K1 model, a fully configurable micro city car that will be launched in summer 2024, starting from 15,000€!

Kate was looking for partners to support their expansion at different levels and increase production of their cars from 200 to 40,000 units per year. One of the priorities was to make the online product presentation more innovative and to automate the online customization and sales process. Interactive 3D naturally emerged as the ideal medium. Emersya was selected as the 3D partner to provide the platform and technology to create an optimized online configurator. The solutions developed by Emersya enrich the customer experience and offer many advantages to support Kate’s growth.

We have had a 2D configurator for a few years but one of the new investors convinced us of the value of 3D. In addition of the attractive offer and the smooth contact with the team, Emersya won us over with the seriousness of their preliminary study. We immediately understood that there were real technical skills behind Emersya. We were also charmed because you are Made in France, like us.

Reinventing online product presentation

Today’s consumers are constantly looking for new and exciting shopping experiences. However, when it comes to buying a car online, the experience also has to be practical and provide the customer with complete freedom to explore the model as they would in a dealership. Kate’s new management team were looking to innovate their product presentation to reflect their innovative product and new brand image. The aim was to attract and convert customers by offering a unique, fun and practical shopping experience.

Emersya’s technology provides a high-end Interactive 3D preview of the vehicle allowing customers to discover the product from every angle. The experience is loaded directly on the website, without the need to download an app or plugin and works on all devices with a specially adapted mobile user interface available. Emersya’s real-time 3D technology stands out from other providers thanks to its realistic rendering effects and ultimate fluidity. Emersya also offers the possibility to visualize products to scale and in context thanks to their web-based augmented reality technology.

Thanks to Emersya’s Interactive 3D, Kate was able to create convenient, fun and engaging shopping experiences that facilitate decision making and boost customer satisfaction, in addition to fueling a disruptive brand image:

The quality of the 3D experiences is impressive! This can only be positive for our customers and our brand.

The ultimate online product customization experience

With 5 customizable parts and multiple options for each, Kate offers over 6000 possible color configurations for their first model: The Original. They choose to update their online customization tool using Emersya’s real-time 3D to enable customers to switch seamlessly among the different color options and preview all possible combinations.

The new 3D configurator empowers customers to create their unique and personalized Kate Original on their own, anytime, anywhere, without the help of a sales representative. With Emersya’s technology, it is also possible to save the configuration and generate a unique link to allow customers to review their custom design, share it and/or resume the configuration process to make changes before confirming their choice.

The Emersya Platform makes it easy to set up the 3D customization experience. Emersya provided tools and expertise to help optimize the original 3D model and reduce the number of polygons over 10 million down to 200 thousand! After that it was a simple case of publishing the model on the platform and defining the color options and rules for each customizable part. Kate’s team can easily update the configuration options and anytime.

Interactive 3D for eCommerce and Made-To-Order

Emersya is an easy-to-use SaaS platform that does not require any special training. Once a product customization experience has been prepared, the platform automatically generates a unique link that can be easily embedded in any web page using and iframe. Kate’s web development team used Emersya’s simple javascript API to link the Emersya 3D viewer to their user interface and ERP.

This was an essential part of the reason why Kate’s chose to use Emersya’s technology as François Jaguelin explains:

I am also a developer and for me, it was essential to be able to communicate with the Emersya 3D viewer and manage every aspect of the user experience through a JavaScript API. I wanted to be able to create and manage the online configurator without necessarily involving the Emersya support team. We haven’t used all features offered by Emersya yet but I’m sure they will be very useful for Kate’s future development.

One of these features is Emersya’s Virtual Photography module which helps brands automate the generation of product visuals, with multiple viewpoints for each available configuration. This feature makes it easy to create product catalogs and marketing images for highly configurable products.

As Kate aims to drastically increase their production numbers for their upcoming models, they are continually looking to scale and automate the online order process. Currently, customers can use the Interactive 3D configurator to pre-order their customized version of The Original model online. This generates a preorder in the ERP and the client is then redirected to a third party online payment module. A sales representative then contacts the customer to review their pre-order, discuss the pricing options and finalize the purchase. The Emersya platform offers advanced features for managing customization options, pricing, quotations and order processing. It is also possible to set up more advanced connections between the Emersya platform and other data systems (such as eCommerce or CMS, ERP, PIM / DAM), which helps streamline and automate data management for selling and manufacturing customized products.

The Interactive 3D product configurator for The Original is just the start of the partnership between Kate and Emersya. Two innovative French companies, the first producing a revolutionary open-air recreation vehicle, the second providing the revolutionary technology to sell it online and at scale. Stay tuned!

Kate