Company News • 26.10.2009

Visual Retailing BV rebrands as iShopShape

Global Rollout and Early Success of New Products Set Course for Future

Visual Retailing BV, a leading provider of retail execution and compliance management solutions, announced today that it is rebranding as iShopShape with immediate effect. The company, whose management remains unchanged, recently launched two innovative products, ShopShape and StyleShoots. These extend iShopShape’s range of solutions that help customers to overcome the challenges of the modern retail market. Both new products have received a very enthusiastic welcome from early-adopter customers. As a result, iShopShape management has adopted a more aggressive growth strategy and felt that the Visual Retailing BV brand limited the company’s market positioning. iShopShape will continue to sell and support the Mockshop and SampleRoom products, which have significant take-up among fashion retailers and manufacturers.

ShopShape is a complementary tool to Mockshop. Mockshop enables fashion manufacturers and retailers to plan, design and optimise the layout and branding of their clothes in stores, leading to stronger sales. As a new web-based application, ShopShape takes visual merchandising to the next level by giving users a complete overview of how products are being displayed in each individual store. It also helps them to manage and monitor compliance with layout and product presentation guidelines. Reports have shown that only 59 per cent of merchandising initiatives are executed in the intended fashion. ShopShape increases this percentage dramatically by facilitating planning and ongoing cost-effective collaboration between merchandisers and the shop floor.
StyleShoots is the other product at the forefront of the company’s current growth spurt. It is a complete hardware and software solution that lets users quickly and efficiently photograph, style and publish pictures of articles in their collection, including web shop. It automatically cuts out the background from a garment photo, so users can work with far more photos per day than with traditional photo tools, with some users reporting time savings of about 80 per cent. Output from StyleShoots is fully compatible with Mockshop, Sampleroom, ShopShape.
“Our rebranding to iShopShape better reflects our growth strategy and the range of products we now offer: Mockshop, Sampleroom, ShopShape and Styleshoots,” says Maurits Teunissen, partner at iShopShape. “Despite current market conditions, customers around the globe rely on our tools to optimize their retail execution and compliance management. In 2009 we have shown considerable growth with multiple new international customers, such as in Germany, Switzerland, Benelux, Spain, Italy, the Nordics, South Africa, Colombia, Mexico, India, China and the USA. The new brand encompasses our focus on helping all our customers to get their shops in the best possible shape and use their merchandising budgets more effectively.”