Virtual Showroom
The floor before the floor.
- Client
- adidas
- Year
- 2020
- Role
- Senior Director, Digital Innovation
- Discipline
- Enterprise / VR
Traditional wholesale buying relied on physical showrooms, printed lookbooks, and 2D presentations. Buyers couldn't interact with the full product line in context.
Merchants couldn't merchandise on the fly. Samples had to be manufactured before a buyer could experience the product. Showrooms were expensive, geographically fixed, and reset with every season.
The brief: replace the 2D slide with a 3D environment that could do things the physical world couldn't.
A functional 3D virtual showroom — built on HTC Vive — where merchants and buyers could meet in a shared VR space to preview products, explore configurations, and provide real-time feedback before samples were manufactured or floor sets built.
"We didn't build a stopgap. We built the thing that should have existed already."
Replacing a 2D slide with a 3D environment isn't a production upgrade — it's a fundamentally different cognitive experience. A buyer who can walk through a virtual floor set makes different decisions than one looking at a deck.
- FirstVR wholesale sell-in at adidas
- 2retail partners onboarded — Dick's Sporting Goods (DSG) and Kohl's
- Enterpriseadopted through Global Sales Solutions
VR meeting room: buyer and merchant viewpoints in the shared environment
Larger pre-orders and reduced sample dependencies weren't accidental. When buyers can see the product in context, in full 3D, before it ships — they buy differently.
The program was very successful until COVID shut down the in-person wholesale selling cycle. The enterprise path through Global Sales Solutions had validated that the pilot wasn't a demonstration. It was a new way to sell.
The technology lived on: it led to the footwear digitization initiative behind Virtual Try-On in the adidas app.
Retail partners
