Furniture brands spend a significant amount of money on photo shoots to showcase their products in appealing settings. Recognizing the high cost and logistical challenges of these shoots, French startup Presti is leveraging generative AI to create realistic lifestyle photos from a single product image. Founded in November 2022, Presti has recently raised $3.5 million in a seed round led by Partech, with participation from various business angels.
Creating high-quality product visuals is crucial for furniture brands to establish a unique identity and boost online sales. Traditionally, this process involves renting luxurious homes, transporting furniture, and managing expensive photo shoots planned months in advance. These logistics can cost companies hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of euros annually. Presti co-founder and CEO Nabil Toumi highlighted the industry’s pain points after speaking with 50 potential users who all echoed the same issues of time, cost, and complexity.
Presti uses a tailored version of Stable Diffusion XL, a generative AI model, to transform a single product image into a lifelike lifestyle photo. Initially, the team encountered issues with the standard Stable Diffusion XL, such as distortions and incorrect perspectives. To address these, Presti retrained the model using a dataset of over 75,000 ultra-high-quality furniture images, enhancing its ability to produce realistic product imagery.
Key Features
- Background Generation: Presti’s AI can generate realistic backgrounds that complement the product, such as ensuring the wall behind a sofa is correctly aligned.
- Accessory Addition: Users can add accessories like cushions, which are integrated into the image with realistic shadows and lighting effects.
- Texture and Color Variations: Although still in development, Presti aims to enable users to swap materials and colors of the same furniture model easily.
Market Impact
Presti primarily targets mid-sized furniture companies but has also secured a strategic partnership with Maisons du Monde, a leading furniture retailer in France. The company’s AI-driven approach promises to significantly reduce costs and streamline the product visualization process for furniture brands.
While Presti’s technology offers numerous advantages, it poses a threat to freelance photographers and other professionals involved in traditional photo shoots. There is also a question of whether AI-generated images can fully replace the creativity and originality brought by human stylists and photographers. Ensuring the resulting images do not appear too artificial or uniform remains a challenge.
Presti’s innovative use of generative AI is set to transform the furniture industry’s approach to product photography. By significantly cutting costs and simplifying the photo shoot process, Presti enables brands to quickly and efficiently release new collections with compelling visuals. The company’s successful seed funding round and strategic partnerships indicate strong market potential and a promising future for AI-driven solutions in the furniture industry.
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