Seeing the tile on the floor before it's bought

The gap

Choosing a tile means imagining a small square across an entire floor or wall. At our client, a ceramics retailer, customers did that the only way they could: they asked staff and guessed.

Staff could describe a tile, hold up a sample or show a photo of someone else's room. None of that showed the tile in the customer's own room, with their own walls, furniture and light. The decision still came down to imagination.

What it costs

Tiles are a purchase people live with for years, and once they're laid, changing your mind is expensive. When customers can't picture the result, they hesitate. They come back to ask again, take longer to decide, or put the decision off.

For a retailer, every one of those moments is a sale that could slip. And the staff answering "how would this look in my room?" have no real way to answer it.

What we built

Nobody asked for it. We saw how the client's customers were choosing tiles and built a visualizer anyway: a customer takes a photo of their room, picks any tile in the catalogue, and sees it laid across their own floor and walls.

We put it where the client's customers already were. The link sits in the client's Instagram bio, so anyone browsing their tiles can try one in their own room in the same moment, without visiting the showroom or downloading anything. It's built in the client's own branding, not ours, so to their customers it's simply part of the store.

How it works

1. link in bio
   01

   Tap the link in the client's Instagram bio.

2. Your room

   Upload photo Use camera
   02

   Upload a photo of the room, or take one with the phone's camera.

3. Choose a tile
   03

   Pick a tile from the catalogue, starring favorites to come back to.

4. Apply to

   FloorWall

   Apply tile
   04

   Choose whether it goes on the floor or the wall.

5. Your room preview

   BeforeAfter
   05

   Tap Apply tile and see it in their own room. From there they can compare before and after, view it full screen, try another tile, or share the result with whoever else has a say.

The work happens out of sight: the system finds the floor or wall in the photo and lays the chosen tile onto it, grout lines included. Whatever sits in front stays in front, from the sofa to a stray cable, so the result looks like the room, not a pattern pasted on top.

What changed

The client hadn't asked for a visualizer, and they ended up loving it. It became one of their favorite tools.

The question at the center of the sale changed. Customers used to ask staff to describe how a tile would look. Now they can see it in their own room before they buy, from the same place they were already browsing.

What we'd measure next

Because nobody asked for this project, it never had the baseline every Pyflx project now starts with. If we were starting it today, these are the numbers we'd agree with the client first: