Nestlé Purina Petcare Takes Category Management Strategy Into the Metaverse With Blue Yonder and 3DVR Solutions

Leading U.S. pet care company drove innovation with Blue Yonder’s category management capabilities and 3DVRS’s 3D visualization

To improve customer experience and satisfaction, retailers are looking to offer a personalized assortment and easy to navigate display of products in their stores. That’s why Nestlé Purina Petcare, the leading manufacturer of pet care products, has successfully implemented Blue Yonder’s category management solution integrated with 3DVR Solutions’ (3DVRS) 3D virtual reality technology to assist its retail partners with better merchandizing of their store shelfs.

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Purina is the No. 1 pet care company in the U.S. It offers more than 20 brands in the U.S., feeding 65 million dogs and 51 million cats annually. Purina provides its retail partners with planograms that design shelfs aimed at merchandizing products to meet customer needs. However, with travel restricted during the COVID-19 lockdowns, it needed an alternate way for its associates to work with its retail partners remotely to replicate critical tasks that would otherwise be performed in front of a physical planogram or in store.

Enter 3DVRS’ innovative Retail Visualisation Suite (RVS) Virtual Reality (VR) Headset solution, which combines planogram data from Blue Yonder with a cutting-edge virtual reality headset provider to deliver a fully interactive, networked avatar-based merchandising solution. This integrated solution brings people from all over the globe into a common unique headset experience in the metaverse where they can plan, present and interact. The integrated solution is now also available to other companies who are looking to solve similar challenges.

Thanks to this integrated solution, Purina has achieved some key benefits:

• Removed the need to be in a physical store to make shelfing decisions by bringing people together in the metaverse, which has in turn reduced environmental impact from less travel and decreased training costs.
• Reduced time to merchandise a shelf via an interactive planogram before moving real product.
• Incorporated true-to-life factors into shelf planning.
• Partner with retailers to enhance the customer journey in store and share global best practices.

“3DVRS’ integration with Blue Yonder delivers flexibility, speed and scale, giving us the ability to effectively deploy across the business. The evolution from virtual reality on the desktop to network avatars in the RVS VR Headset solution has been seamless. We can now hold meetings virtually in the metaverse, interact with layouts, products, and store innovations, allowing us to be right at the cutting edge,” said Gene Feldman, training manager, Purina.

Together, Blue Yonder’s category management and 3DVRS’ RVS VR Headset solutions have enabled Purina’s retail partners to make faster, more accurate and localized space allocation decisions to help their customers find the products they need more easily while guaranteeing a better shopping and service experience.

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“Purina is a fantastic partner to innovate with as they are always looking to the latest technology to give their business the edge. The challenges they presented pushed technological boundaries. Our integration with Blue Yonder gives us the platform to support large enterprises such as Purina. It’s great to bring new tech to the market that makes a real difference. It’s amazing what we have achieved together already, but I sense there’s a lot more to come,” said Nigel Hemer, CEO and founder, 3DVR Solutions.

“Working with 3DVRS has allowed us to bring Blue Yonder’s planograms to life in the metaverse where users can merchandise, analyze, interact, and meet as avatars to design shelfs that meet customers’ needs. This is cutting-edge technology at its finest and Purina was one of the first companies to benefit from it. By creating a culture of innovation and thought leadership throughout the organization, Purina is building a great place to work for both their associates and retail partners,” said Phillip Teschemacher, corporate vice president, Manufacturing – EMEA, Blue Yonder.

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