Backyard sheds run the gamut from basic utility structures to charming mini-houses that serve a variety of purposes, such as gardening, potting, and relaxation. It’s the latter type of small, decorative buildings—sheds that complement residential homes—that is the bailiwick of The Posh Shed Company.
A subsidiary of United-Kindgom-based Playchildren Ltd., The Posh Shed Company designs, manufactures, and builds a range of configurable backyard and garden sheds, and also provides a custom-designed, bespoke service. Offering unique designs like The Chelsea, The Ludlow, and The Gothic Shed, the company builds sheds of several types with many options and building finishes, ranging from Posh to Very Posh to Unbelievably Posh. The number of shed models and the range of shed building finish levels combine to produce a large number of possible unique shed configurations. To make the shed configuration process more efficient and the online shopping experience more enjoyable for customers, The Posh Shed Company began looking for an online product configuration solution, according to Sales & Marketing Manager Jessica Pritchard. “In the past, customers typically configured their sheds over the phone, which took some time and did not provide an immediate visual reference,” Pritchard explains. “We were looking for different ways to get realistic 3D representations of custom-configured sheds on our website, so customers could interactively configure their own sheds and receive instantaneous visual feedback of how their chosen shed design will look.
In addition to saving time and giving customers a more enjoyable online ordering experience, we believed that adding configuration capabilities to our website would help us sell more sheds.” While the company’s initial search for an online configuration solution resulted in what Pritchard termed “pricey” services, it eventually learned about the SOLIDWORKS Sell online product configuration solution from Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS Corp. “Our company uses SOLIDWORKS 3D design software to design our sheds and we came across SOLIDWORKS Sell, which turned out to be a lot more affordable, on the SOLIDWORKS Blog,” Pritchard recalls.
The Posh Shed Company chose to implement the SOLIDWORKS Sell online product configuration solution because it is cost effective and works well with SOLIDWORKS design data, proividing integration through the SOLIDWORKS Application Programming Interface (API). SOLIDWORKS Sell is also webbased, and requires no dedicated hardware, reducing the cost of IT. “We were able to work directly with the SOLIDWORKS development team and APO to add some features that are unique to us,” Pritchard says.