Presti uses GenAI to replace costly furniture industry picture sessions

If you bought an online sofa, did you think of the houses you can see in the background of products of products? When it was time to release a new collection, furniture brands generally take a small state on a photo shoot. This is a bulky expensive process, as moving furniture is not easy.

Therefore, the French startup called Presti, established in November 2022, uses the generated AI to turn the image of one product into a lifestyle -style photo. The company has procured a $ 3.5 million seed tour led by Technological Investment Company Global Partech. Several business angels are also participating.

"Very quick, we got the phone and talked with 50 potential users," said PRESTI of NABIL TOUMI. “And they all said the same thing: creating product visuals is a time-consuming and expensive process, and there was no easy solution for creating these photos. At the same time, creating a unique identity and selling online is truly the most important asset for brands.

At the beginning, Presti did not limit its scope of activity to furniture companies only. But the startup soon realized that furniture companies faced particularly difficult problems. "They had to rent nice homes for the photo shoots, they had to ship the product, so the logistical costs were high. And these photo shoots were planned months in advance, ultimately costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, of dollars a year," Toomey said. At the center, Presti uses a stable XL diffusion as a basic model. It is particularly suitable for product images in the furniture industry because it is recycled and set. The team first tried using the vanilla version of Stable Diffusion XL. But they quickly realized there were problems. "You'd have to attach legs to the sofa, but the back would be distorted," Toumi explains. Getting the perspective right was similarly difficult. For example, the wall behind the sofa should be parallel to the sofa.

“At the same time, what really matters is the dataset we trained our model on. We currently have over 75,000 images of very high-quality furniture photography in our industry that we can use to train our model to improve the learning process for a specific use case of this type of photography,” Toomey said.

Presti didn’t want to limit himself to just creating the background. Customers can also add accessories, for example, if you are generating a product photo for a new sofa, you can add cushions. These pillows create realistic shadows on the sofa so it doesn't look like it was added in Photoshop.

Similarly, furniture brands usually offer several variations of the same model in different textures and colors. While this work is still in development, Presti hopes that customers will be able to replace the material with tools, making it much easier for companies that use Presti to launch new products. On the other hand, freelance photographers are not going to like this new product. And the question remains whether the creativity and originality of other skilled people who might be involved in a physical photoshoot, such as an on-site stylists, can be fully replaced by machine-generated backgrounds without the resulting artificial lifestyle images looking ungainly. It's pretty much the same question.