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Scene7 is an American on-demand
rich media Interactive media normally refers to products and services on digital computer-based systems which respond to the user's actions by presenting content such as text, moving image, animation, video and audio. Since its early conception, various f ...
software company A software company is a company whose primary products are various forms of software, software technology, distribution, and software product development. They make up the software industry. Types There are a number of different types of softw ...
that provides document hosting and interactive publishing services such as online catalogs, targeted
email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
, video, and image management. Retailers use the company's services to showcase products on their websites and to allow customers to interact with the products. Scene7's technology allows users to manipulate product images by zooming in and rotating products, simulating the inspection of merchandise in retail stores. The company, founded as a division of Autodesk, created a room decoration computer software called Picture This Home in the mid-1990s. The division was sold to Broderbund in 1998, then spun off as a company called GoodHome.com in June 1999. After GoodHome.com failed to become profitable, it was reorganized and renamed Scene7. It formally launched on January 23, 2001, and focused on helping companies prepare interactive advertisements for consumers.
Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the crea ...
acquired Scene7 in 2007 for an undisclosed sum.


Company

A subsidiary of
Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the crea ...
, Scene7 provides document hosting and interactive publishing services, typically charging clients to convert catalog print files to interactive web pages. The company does most of its business in North America. Its primary competitors for dynamic imaging services and technology are RichFX and LiquidPixels. Scene7 products rely on several Adobe products, including
Adobe Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Microsoft Windows, Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas Knoll, Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the indu ...
,
Adobe InDesign Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application produced by Adobe Inc. and first released in 1999. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, ...
,
Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia Computing platform, software platform used for production of Flash animation, animations, rich web applications, application software, desktop applications, mobile apps, mo ...
, Adobe Illustrator, and
Adobe Flex Apache Flex, formerly Adobe Flex, is a software development kit (SDK) for the development and deployment of cross-platform rich web applications based on the Adobe Flash platform. Initially developed by Macromedia and then acquired by Adobe Syste ...
; this relationship existed before Adobe purchased the company. Scene7 does not maintain any servers to host its services; instead, it uses a "pay as you grow" program that only requires it to pay for the resources that it uses. Scene7's clients include the companies
Sears Sears, Roebuck and Co. ( ), commonly known as Sears, is an American chain of department stores founded in 1892 by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck and reincorporated in 1906 by Richard Sears and Julius Rosenwald, with what began a ...
,
Lands' End Lands' End is an American clothing and home decor retailer founded in 1963 and based in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, that specializes in casual clothing, luggage, and home furnishings. The majority of the company's business is conducted through mail o ...
,
Harrods Harrods Limited is a department store located on Brompton Road in Knightsbridge, London, England. It is currently owned by the state of Qatar via its sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority. The Harrods brand also applies to other ...
,
Macy's Macy's (originally R. H. Macy & Co.) is an American chain of high-end department stores founded in 1858 by Rowland Hussey Macy. It became a division of the Cincinnati-based Federated Department Stores in 1994, through which it is affiliated wi ...
,
Office Depot The ODP Corporation is an American office supply holding company headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida. The company has combined annual sales of approximately $11 billion, and employs about 38,000 associates with businesses in the United States. ...
, Levi Strauss & Co.,
La-Z-Boy La-Z-Boy Inc. (pronounced "lazy boy") is an American furniture manufacturer based in Monroe, Michigan, United States, that makes home furniture, including upholstered recliners, sofas, stationary chairs, lift chairs and sleeper sofas. The compa ...
, and
QVC QVC (short for "Quality Value Convenience") is an American free-to-air television network, and flagship shopping channel specializing in televised home shopping, owned by Qurate Retail Group. Founded in 1986 by Joseph Segel in West Chester, Penn ...
. In 2001, Scene7 agreed to develop home design and landscaping software for Individual Software for $50 million. High-end casual clothing retailer Anthropologie has used Scene7's services to create and deploy online catalogs for its
e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain manageme ...
website since November 9, 2004. The retailer implemented Scene7's Dynamic Imaging service to let customers zoom in on products, similar to how merchandise is inspected in retail stores. The
Harrods Harrods Limited is a department store located on Brompton Road in Knightsbridge, London, England. It is currently owned by the state of Qatar via its sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority. The Harrods brand also applies to other ...
department store signed an agreement with Scene7 on June 24, 2005, to use Scene7's imaging and catalog system on the store's website. This required Harrods to convert all its printed material to a digital format for Internet use. On October 20, 2005, web agency Logan Tod announced that it had partnered with Scene7 to offer new features on its e-commerce websites. These include Scene7's Dynamic Imaging service, which allows visitors to zoom in on products to see details; this feature, Logan Tod claimed, helps to drive purchase decisions. Fathead, a company that builds and sells wall graphics, uses Scene7's services on its website to generate images and to allow visitors to layer images on top of each other dynamically. National Business Furniture, a furniture retailer based in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin Milwaukee ( ), officially the City of Milwaukee, is both the most populous and most densely populated city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, Milwaukee County. With a population of 577,222 at th ...
, implemented Scene7's technology on November 3, 2008, allowing visitors to dynamically change the colors of product images on the company's website.


History


GoodHome.com (1995−2000)

The company began as a development team that created software called Picture This Home in the mid-1990s for Autodesk in
San Rafael, California San Rafael ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for "Raphael (archangel), St. Raphael", ) is a city and the county seat of Marin County, California, Marin County, California, United States. The city is located in the North Bay (San Francisco Bay Area), ...
. The program allowed people to virtually preview room decoration projects before any work began. Its users can create virtual rooms, change walls and arrange furniture, and create photo-realistic renderings of completed designs. Picture This Home was awarded the ''
Good Housekeeping ''Good Housekeeping'' is an American women's magazine featuring articles about women's interests, product testing by The Good Housekeeping Institute, recipes, diet, and health, as well as literary articles. It is well known for the "Good House ...
'' Seal of Approval. In 1998, the software and its team of 40 developers were sold to Broderbund, which was owned by
The Learning Company The Learning Company (TLC) was an educational software company founded in 1980 in Palo Alto, California and headquartered in Fremont, California. The company produced a grade-based line of learning software, edutainment games, and productivity ...
, a subsidiary of
Mattel Inc Mattel, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational toy manufacturing and entertainment company founded in January 1945 and headquartered in El Segundo, California. The company has presence in 35 countries and territories and sells products in more ...
. Broderbund eventually spun Picture This Home off as a company called GoodHome.com in June 1999 with Doug Mack as its CEO. The company received $30 million in venture capital from Hearst Interactive Media. Mack noted that before Broderbund spun off GoodHome.com as a separate company, there was a "big culture clash" between the established company and the
new media New media describes communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users as well as interaction between users and content. In the middle of the 1990s, the phrase "new media" became widely used as part of a sales pitch for ...
division. He said that companies such as Broderbund were so concerned with established business that smaller, newer divisions found it hard to receive sufficient attention and bandwidth. He praised Broderbund's decision to spin the company off as a separate entity: "We would have never been able to build our Web business if we were not in a separate building with separate funding." Mack observed that newer companies like GoodHome.com rarely had any problem in hiring new employees because of the opportunity for Internet companies to grow quickly into "the next
Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economi ...
". In September 1999, GoodHome.com merged with
Alexandria, Virginia Alexandria is an independent city (United States), independent city in the northern region of the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Virginia, United States. It lies on the western bank of the Potomac River approximately south of Downto ...
-based nHabit.com, a rival company, for an undisclosed sum. After the merger, GoodHome.com was assured that it would grow quickly; the merger also added the
Internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise private ...
America Online AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo! Inc. ...
to GoodHome.com's portfolio as a client. Ten weeks after forming a business plan, GoodHome.com officially launched on September 29, 1999 with offices in San Rafael and New York City, New York, and
Roger Horchow Samuel Roger Horchow (July 3, 1928 – May 2, 2020) was an American retailer and Broadway producer. Horchow was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Beatrice (Schwartz) and Reuben Horchow, an attorney. In 1971, he started The Horchow Collection, ...
was assigned as its chairman. The company used the slogan "A beautiful home. It was never this easy," and focused on selling furniture and other home items, spending $20 million on advertisements in its first year. Mack decided that the company should target women, since "women make 80 percent of decorating decisions." The company built a home furnishings portal to compete with the websites Living.com and Furniture.com, which both went bankrupt in 2000. In April 2000, GoodHome.com's monthly sales topped $1 million; the company's goal was to be profitable within two to three years. One of the website's biggest attractions was its virtual decorating service that let customers see how certain features such as the paint, upholstery fabric, rugs, and pillows would look before a purchase. When considering why this service was so popular, Mack noted that consumers usually feel more confident in a purchase when there are few unknowns. At the time, selling products over the Internet was not a popular concept outside the United States, but Mack was confident in expanding GoodHome.com's portfolio to include foreign companies: "We're already getting so many requests from companies about expanding our website abroad... I see this happening quickly within the next few years." GoodHome.com encountered difficulties in running its business in 2000, when several other companies that offered similar services launched. The increasing demand for online catalog services, considered a phenomenon, was dubbed the "hottest thing since sliced bread" by an analyst from technology research firm
Forrester Research Forrester is a research and advisory company that offers a variety of services including research, consulting, and events. Forrester has nine North America locations: Cambridge, Massachusetts; New York, New York; San Francisco, California; McL ...
, which estimated that roughly $500 million was invested in home furnishing websites from 1999 to 2000. It became difficult for consumers to decide which service provided better quality; a business owner commented, "You can't tell the difference in quality between something that's $3,000 and something that's $10,000." GoodHome.com, which had offered free shipping, phased out the feature on July 15, 2000, in favor of "heavily subsidized rates". To compete with new companies, GoodHome.com also introduced new features such as a "floor planning" feature to allow website visitors build an electronic version of their rooms, then drag in furnishings to see how they fit.


Reorganization (2001−2007)

After spending several years operating at a loss, GoodHome.com reorganized as Scene7, which formally launched on January 23, 2001, with $15 million raised from investors that included Hearst Interactive Media. The new company focused on helping companies prepare interactive advertisements for consumers. Mack, the Broderbund executive who had decided to spin off the company, reflected on the decision to reorganize and relaunch: "We got a year into he initial GoodHome schemeand the whole B2C ( business-to-consumer) market tanked, and we realized we could not build a successful business as a portal ..But the whole time we kept having people approach us to license the technology o create virtual catalogs and finally a light bulb went off when we realized we were sitting on top of a great technology we could sell." Scene7 raised a round of financing on July 12, 2001, that totaled $11.3 million, which helped stabilize the company. The deal was led by venture capitalists from several firms, including
Louis Bacon Louis Moore Bacon (born July 25, 1956) is an American investor, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. He is the founder and chief executive of Moore Capital Management. ''Forbes Magazine'' estimates his net worth to be US$1.81 billion, mak ...
's Moore Capital Management and Xcelera of the
Cayman Islands The Cayman Islands () is a self-governing British Overseas Territory—the largest by population in the western Caribbean Sea. The territory comprises the three islands of Grand Cayman, Cayman Brac and Little Cayman, which are located to the ...
, with cash investments from
Cooley Godward Cooley LLP is an American international law firm, headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with offices worldwide. The firm's practice areas include corporate, litigation, intellectual property, fund formation, public markets, employment, life s ...
and
Perkins Coie Perkins Coie is an American multinational law firm headquartered in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1912, it is recognized as an Am Law 50 firm. It is the largest law firm headquartered in the Pacific Northwest and has 20 offices across the Un ...
. After the latest round of financing, Mack planned for Scene7 to have 15 clients and a
burn rate Burn rate is the rate at which a company is losing money. It is typically expressed in monthly terms. E.g., "the company's burn rate is currently $65,000 per month." In this sense, the word "burn" is a synonymous term for negative cash flow. ...
, or negative
cash flow A cash flow is a real or virtual movement of money: *a cash flow in its narrow sense is a payment (in a currency), especially from one central bank account to another; the term 'cash flow' is mostly used to describe payments that are expected ...
, of less than $700,000 a month, stating, "What we learned was to stick to your strategy, and don't get nervous when the competition is adopting a strategy to spend their way to victory." At the time, the company's revenues were well below its peak of $1 million a month, but Mack intended to increase revenues past that point in a few months. Scene7 moved from San Rafael to Hamilton Landing in Novato, California in September 2002 to accommodate more employees. On July 9, 2003, the company acquired all of the assets of
workflow A workflow consists of an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. It can be depicted as a sequence of ...
provider and advertising software company Engage for $1.2 million and assumed its $650,000 debt after Engage filed for
Chapter 11 bankruptcy Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code (Title 11 of the United States Code) permits reorganization under the bankruptcy laws of the United States. Such reorganization, known as Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is available to every business, whe ...
. Engage was the parent company of both Cascade and MidSystems, which were two of the first companies that tried to automate
prepress Prepress is the term used in the Printing and Publishing industries for the processes and procedures that occur between the creation of a print layout and the final printing. The prepress process includes the preparation of artwork for press, media ...
production for newspapers and large printers. On August 15, 2003, Scene7 acquired its top competitor, TrueSpectra of San Mateo, for an undisclosed amount of cash and stock. On June 15, 2004, Scene7 raised $7.5 million in another round of financing, led by
home shopping Home shopping is the electronic retailing and home shopping channels industry, which includes such billion dollar television-based and e-commerce companies as Shop LC, HSN, Gemporia, TJC, QVC, eBay, ShopHQ, Buy.com and Amazon.com, as well as tradit ...
company
QVC QVC (short for "Quality Value Convenience") is an American free-to-air television network, and flagship shopping channel specializing in televised home shopping, owned by Qurate Retail Group. Founded in 1986 by Joseph Segel in West Chester, Penn ...
with some of Scene7's existing investors. At the same time, Jeffrey Branman, President of Interactive Technology Partners at QVC, and
David Rubenstein David Mark Rubenstein (born August 11, 1949) is an American billionaire businessman. A former government official and lawyer, he is a co-founder and co-chairman of the private equity firm The Carlyle Group,private equity In the field of finance, the term private equity (PE) refers to investment funds, usually limited partnerships (LP), which buy and restructure financially weak companies that produce goods and provide services. A private-equity fund is both a ty ...
firm
The Carlyle Group The Carlyle Group is a multinational private equity, alternative asset management and financial services corporation based in the United States with $376 billion of assets under management. It specializes in private equity, real assets, and pri ...
, joined Scene7's board of directors, which was composed of James Caccavo of Moore Capital, Andrew Wright of
RealNetworks RealNetworks, Inc. is a provider of artificial intelligence and computer vision based products. RealNetworks was a pioneer in Internet streaming software and services. They are based in Seattle, Washington, United States. The company also p ...
, and Mack. Since the early 2000s, the company's growth has been fueled by an increase in
broadband Internet access Internet access is the ability of individuals and organizations to connect to the Internet using computer terminals, computers, and other devices; and to access services such as email and the World Wide Web. Internet access is sold by Internet ...
, which loads virtual catalogs faster than
dial-up Internet access Dial-up Internet access is a form of Internet access that uses the facilities of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) to establish a connection to an Internet service provider (ISP) by dialing a telephone number on a conventional telepho ...
. When catalogs first appeared online in the late 1990s, the graphics took too long to load. After high-speed Internet access became more popular, virtual catalogs quickly grew to become a popular feature of online stores. In addition to faster Internet connectivity, a study in 2000 noted that an online presence for brick and mortar businesses increased offline sales by an average of 27%. Mack also pointed out that having more product information disseminated helps play a role in increasing sales: "We have the ability to provide consistent information... One of the advantages of selling furniture online is the hyperscript; you always have the original specifications on a product."


Subsidiary of Adobe (2007)

Scene7 was acquired by Adobe Systems on May 31, 2007, for an undisclosed sum. At that time, Scene7 had 80 employees, most of whom were transferred from Scene7's former headquarters in
Novato Novato (Spanish for "Novatus") is a city in Marin County, California, in the North Bay region of the Bay Area. At the 2020 census, Novato had a population of 53,225. History What is now Novato was originally the site of several Coast Miwok ...
, California to Adobe's offices in
San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
, California. Mack joined Adobe as its vice president of Creative Solutions Services. Scene7 was added to Adobe's product line as a hosted service to help boost Adobe's overall services strategy, especially its
software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is con ...
efforts, and because Scene7 was a great fit due to its heavy usage of Adobe products. Adobe plans to integrate Scene7's products into
Adobe LiveCycle Adobe LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (ES4) is a service-oriented architecture Java EE server software product from Adobe Systems used to build applications that automate a broad range of business processes for enterprises and government agencies. Liv ...
, the company's suite of server software products, at an unspecified time. The Scene7 brand will continue to be used, but it will "eventually be replaced with the Adobe brand". Denmark-based YaWah, a dynamic imaging software company, was acquired by Adobe on September 26, 2008, to help expand Scene7 globally.


References

{{Adobe Systems Mass media companies of the United States 2007 mergers and acquisitions Companies based in San Rafael, California Discontinued Adobe software