Wednesday January 15, 2020 at 10:17am
Smart home technology has seen a lot of development over this past decade. From voice assistants, to being able to control your thermostats and door bells through your phone, this industry is set to get more intelligent in the coming years. In this post, we learn more about our customer, Faradite, who joined our Entrepreneur Program and are staying ahead of the curve by designing sleek and modern smart home accessories.
We interviewed Matthew Emberson, Sales and Marketing Manager at Faradite, to understand how this start up uses SOLIDWORKS as a marketing tool to showcase their products online.
“Here at Faradite we design and manufacture smart home accessories that are compatible with high-end smart home control systems such as Control4, Lutron, Loxone, Crestron and more. At just 50mm wide the Motion Sensor 360 range is one of the smallest and most discreet sensors in the industry. Alongside our motion sensors, we also manufacture a modern, elegant and minimalist TAP range of switch plates. Designed and manufactured in the UK and distributed worldwide, our products have already enhanced thousands of home automation projects in over 30 countries.”
Watch this video to hear from our Group Marketing Manager more on how you can use SOLIDWORKS Visualize for marketing.
“Much of the initial product design is done within SOLIDWORKS CAD, once product designs are finalised and go to manufacture we then move onto SOLIDWORKS Visualize. We use this for most of our marketing collateral, including product shots for our online store, imagery for technical documentation and social media content. We use Visualize renders alongside product photography, with renders being used mostly for the technical aspects of our messaging. Using renders allows us to easily arrange and capture realistic but ultra-clean imagery for the technical information we want to communicate.
For example, renders formed an important part of our recent website re-design, the ease of creating the content at the exact dimensions for specific elements of the revamp was extremely useful.”
“Our industrial designer found the Entrepreneur Program and suggested that we applied, it's great that we can fully evaluate all the tools on offer to get the most out of the software before deciding on what extensions and apps we need in the future.
Before our use of SOLIDWORKS Visualize, we had to rely heavily on pure photography for content. Although we still use photography, we now create visuals faster, it also gives us the ability to easily tweak images and re-export if there is anything that needs correcting, something that is not as easy with photography.
From the engineering perspective, SOLIDWORKS gives us the ability to do everything you would ever want from a 3D CAD package. We use SOLIDWORKS to generate production-ready drafted 3D models for injection moulding, but we also use it to create 2D tolerance drawings from the same 3D reference models. It also gives us a handful of tools that help us with design for manufacture including, draft analysis, gap analysis etc. Being able to share the same native SOLIDWORKS part files and assemblies with our marketing team and production team has enabled us to speed up our time to market.”
“The software helped us improve our messaging. It allowed us to standardise a lot of our technical messaging as the visuals we can now produce are universal and the style of output can be easily replicated across various products and media. As our brand expands into new territories around the world, the need for clear, universally understandable documentation is essential. From an engineering perspective, the main improvement has come from the ability for us to streamline our processes.”
“Our staff have found the training courses to be very informative. However, there have been occasions where we still needed to contact the Solid Solutions support team for a bit of help. Every time we contacted them, the support team were quick to understand what we were trying to achieve and equally as quick to provide a suitable solution. We would certainly recommend them as a partner as they are quick, informative and take a genuine interest in the project we are working on.”
Connect with Faradite via their Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube!