Case study
How &Tradition Brought Two Very Different Product Families Into 3D - On One Platform.
&Tradition designs furniture and lighting where a single series can run to hundreds of valid combinations - and almost none of them can be photographed.
We built the brand two live configurators on the same platform. Rely is a chair family, assembled from a base and a shell. Hi Lo is a modular sofa, built one module at a time. They are different products with different rules and different ways of being configured, and they run on one platform, one integration and one shared set of features.
Rely: a chair assembled from parts, not picked from a list
Rely is configured the way it is built. The customer starts with the frame and chooses its type and finish - a tube base in black, bronzed or chrome, or wooden legs in oak. Then comes the shell: the plastic version, or a fully upholstered one. Upholstery is browsed the way the brand's own material library is organised, by collection and by name, and the chosen fabric appears on the chair immediately rather than as a swatch beside it. Dimensions can be shown on the model itself, measured and to scale. The part that matters most is the part the customer never notices. Not every combination of base and shell is a chair &Tradition makes. Switch Rely onto wooden legs while an armchair shell is selected, and the configurator moves to the side chair, because the armchair is not offered on that base. The rules live in the configurator, so every configuration a customer arrives at is one the brand can actually produce.
Hi Lo: a sofa built module by module
Hi Lo follows a different logic entirely. There is no single product to specify - there is a library of modules that snap together into whatever shape the room asks for, from a three-seater to a corner arrangement with a pouf. The composition is measured as it grows, so a customer can see whether the sofa they are drawing will fit before they fall in love with it. Here too the rules are part of the tool rather than a note in a spec sheet: the corner module cannot sit at either end, and the sofa has to finish on a centre module. Upholstery is filtered by price group, which keeps the choice honest - customers see what a material does to the piece and where it sits commercially, in the same view. Finished compositions can be saved, shared by link, exported as an overview to bring to a store, or handed straight to the nearest dealer.
Two configuration models, one feature set
Rely and Hi Lo are configured on entirely different principles, but a customer moving between them meets the same product. Save and share, PDF export, view in AR, dimensions, fullscreen, undo, recentre and clear - these are not features of the Rely configurator or the Hi Lo configurator. They belong to the platform, and each family inherits them. The same is true of everything around the configurators: product data from &Tradition's own systems, language and country handling, and embedding either inside the site or as a standalone experience. It was set up once, and it serves both families.
Adding the next series does not start a new project
This is the part that is easy to miss when a configurator is bought as a project rather than a platform. Servers, product data, embedding, localisation and the entire feature set were established once. What a new series needs is its 3D assets and its own rule set - what it is made of, and which combinations are real. So the second family did not mean a second platform, a second integration or a second configurator to maintain, and neither will the third. &Tradition's customers have now built more than 40,000 configurations across the two families, and the volume has grown every month since launch.