New customer Karl Dose about first 3D rendering and how to make ships shine

RenderThat X Karl Dose. Or:

“3D Power” meets “Power for Ships”

Under the motto “Power for Ships”, the traditional Hamburg-based company has been supplying ships with electricity and light on the high seas — all over the world.

Anyone who keeps their head above water for so long has experienced many upheavals.
Now the Hamburg-based manufacturer has also taken different paths to market a new product.

Felix Beuss, Marketing & Sales Manager at Karl Dose, talks about his experiences in an interview with us as project manager.

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Which product did you have visualized with the help of RenderThat?

Felix Beuss, Sales & Marketing Manager at Karl Dose GmbH: So, the Phoenix spotlight is a new product. A product that comes onto the market during the year. Due to its construction and also its brightness, it is very suitable for everything that requires a lot of light and little space.

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What value do visuals have for you?

Felix Beuss: In fact, images are very, very important to us, at least in marketing. And this has actually been tried again and again in recent months and years, with the help of photographers who have just joined the company and set up a setup.

And that's all linked to time. And the customer would of course like to see in advance: “What does my product look like, what did I actually buy there?”

That's why we actually came up with the idea of simply trying out the whole thing as a rendering, so that you don't have to let the photographer come for a single product.

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What were your requirements for RenderThat?

Felix Beuss: In principle, we actually only needed reference images for our newsletter, but at the same time we also checked for our online shop and on our homepage that you get a 3D model so that the customer could finally look at it for themselves. What does the phoenix look like? What are the dimensions? So that the customer can deduce it themselves.

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What concerns did you have in advance?

Felix Beuss: So there were only concerns about this point that the product really looks very digital, that you could then see from the image that it is not a real product at all. But fortunately that did not happen. So the product really looked in the picture as if it was in production at our plant. And that really surprised us.

So what is really possible with technology today really surprised us that it is so easy to implement using CAD data, from reference images, that you say, okay, this product could now be in the warehouse here.

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How has Karl Dose used visuals so far?

Felix Beuss: So far, we've really only used the visuals for catalogs. And our homepage. But that wasn't much, because it was always very complex to create pictures and recreate different scenes.

And of course, we can now get around that much more easily thanks to the rendering and can say “Geez, we need the image in this and that perspective again” and then it's done within 24 to 48 hours.

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How did it work with the digital twin?

Felix Beuss: In other words, it took about one to a maximum of three days to create the digital twin. However, it was also our challenge in advance that we had to adapt the CAD files, as we wanted to remove the entire inner workings for safety reasons. Just so that someone gets or sees this file at some point, doesn't have the opportunity to recreate the whole thing themselves.

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When did you receive the first picture?

Felix Beuss: The digital twin was then visible in the HUB and then we took a look at it again internally. Of course, we also have to ask the various departments, including our technical department, whether the phoenix really looks like it is pictured there now. And then there were one or two changes and then the first image was ready for series production within 48 hours that we could say: “That looks 100% like what we're building!”

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How did the collaboration work for you?

Felix Beuss: So the communication and how you handled any changes from our side, how we communicated overall, was really pretty straightforward. Simply by email or even by phone, or that we sent you a screenshot of a perspective and asked for it: “Here can you please change the and color of that again briefly?”

So we really liked all the communication and that we were able to watch it online on any computer. It was also really cool that it was also possible for our managing director, who travels a lot with his mobile phone, could simply look at the pictures and the 3D model in the HUB while on the go.

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What else does Karl Dose produce?

Felix Beuss: Karl Dose is mainly engaged in manufacturing lighting for the maritime market for ships. And we have lots of special offers and products there.

We are also active in the areas of electrical installation material, including container sockets. In principle, everything you need on the high seas to get goods and goods safely from A to B.

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What does Karl Dose do particularly well?

Felix Beuss: What really sets us apart is that we have such high demands on the products that some competitors are simply dropping out of, because then it may no longer be as lucrative for them, because then the quantities will only be lower.
And we also have expertise, as many of our colleagues come from the shipping industry.

They went to sea themselves and they actually know what the maritime market demands and what requirements arise there.

That has shaped us and we have been on the market for over 100 years.

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What did you learn from the project with RenderThat?

Felix Beuss: So we've actually learned a lot, especially for our purposes, that it's much, much faster if you can simply have larger products that we don't want to get from A to B quickly now digitized through rendering and so we can get our images much more easily.

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