Virtual Showroom Examples in Retail

The easiest way to see what a virtual showroom can do for a store is to look at brands already running one. In this article, we look at six live examples — five from home retail, one from automotive — and each takes a different route: a 3D copy of a flagship store, a room planner, a scan of a real design center, a VR kitchen studio, a virtual dealership, and curtains previewed on a photo of the shopper's own room.

For each one, we break down what shoppers actually do, how the experience leads to a purchase, and which ideas you can borrow for your own store.

What is a Virtual Showroom?

Virtual showroom is a branded digital space where shoppers explore products in context, a room, a store or a dealership, and interact with them: walk through, swap, or configure. That context is what separates a showroom from a product page. It may be a browser-based room, a scanned customer space, a 360-degree tour of a physical showroom, or an experience viewed through a headset.

The 6 Examples at a Glance

The examples below differ in two ways. Some bring shoppers into the brand’s own space — a flagship, a design center, a dealership — while others bring the product into the shopper’s room. And some work entirely in the browser, while others rely on a store associate or a headset. Here’s how they compare at a glance.

1. Crate & Barrel Virtual Flagship: A 3D Store That Mirrors a Real One

When Crate & Barrel opened its new Flatiron flagship in New York in November 2023, it launched a digital twin alongside it, built on the virtual store platform Obsess (Retail Dive). The idea is simple: give shoppers who will never walk down Broadway the same curated room sets that make a flagship sell.

What shoppers do:

Move through a photorealistic copy of the store — more than 450 products across eight rooms, from dining and kitchen to a botanical shop and Crate & Kids. They can customize furniture and even arrange a bouquet from the brand's vases and greenery.

Path to purchase:

Products are shoppable from the space, and a Design Desk inside the store connects visitors to Crate & Barrel's free design services.

The lesson for retailers:

Pair the virtual space with a person. A designer one click away turns browsing into a conversation about a whole room, not a single item.

Limits:

450 hand-picked products is a showcase, not the catalog, and every seasonal refresh is a new production job. A navigable 3D space also asks more of the shopper than a product page. Research backs both sides: interactivity and spatial cues in 3D stores can raise purchase intent (Journal of Interactive Marketing, 2020), while clumsy navigation cuts into the value shoppers get (Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 2025).

See it: virtualstore.crateandbarrel.com/flagship

2. IKEA Kreativ: Designed Rooms and the Shopper's Own Room in One Tool

IKEA Kreativ goes after the biggest doubt in furniture shopping — will it fit, and will it look right in my room? — and offers two ways in: a gallery of more than 50 designed 3D rooms and a scanner that turns the shopper's own room into an editable 3D copy (IKEA).

What shoppers do:

In a designed room, they swap, move, rotate, stack and hang IKEA products. In their own scanned room, they can erase the furniture that's already there and fill the space with new pieces.

Path to purchase:

Everything placed is a real product from the live catalog, and the design travels with the shopper to the store through the IKEA app.

The lesson for retailers:

Offer both entry points. Designed rooms are the easy start for people looking for ideas; their own room is for people close to buying.

Limits:

This is the in-house route. The core technology came from Geomagical Labs, which Ingka Group bought in 2020 — an investment few retailers can match. The scan step also asks the shopper to do some work before they see anything.

See it: IKEA Kreativ on ikea.com and in the IKEA app.

For a side-by-side with a ready-made alternative, see IKEA Kreativ vs Zolak Showroom.

3. Ethan Allen: A 360° Tour of a Real Design Center

Ethan Allen's Virtual Design Center is now a Matterport scan of its physical design centers — you can walk through the Albuquerque, New Mexico location without leaving the sofa. It wasn't always this simple. In 2022 the same name stood for a full 3D experience built with Bitreel, planned for 75 room settings and more than 2,000 shoppable products, with live co-browsing alongside an Ethan Allen designer (Furniture Today).

What shoppers do:

Walk from room to room, switch to a dollhouse or floor plan view, and measure distances with the built-in tool. It's an easy way to get a feel for the atmosphere, layout and range before booking an appointment or driving over.

Path to purchase:

None inside the tour. Products aren't tagged, and the price cards on the furniture are physical ones, photographed with the room. To buy, the shopper has to leave the tour and find the product on the website. Tours can do more: outdoor furniture brand Sunset West tagged collections in its showroom tour with links to product details and tear sheets (Furniture Today).

The lesson for retailers:

If you already have a well-merchandised showroom, scanning it is the cheapest way to get it online. Just tag the products — without tags, the tour is a nice view with no next step.

Limits:

The tour shows exactly what was on the floor on scan day: no other finishes, nothing that wasn't installed, and a new scan for every new display. The switch from a full 3D design center to a photo tour under the same name is also a reminder that a large 3D store needs ongoing investment to stay current.

See it: https://www.ethanallen.com/en_US/virtual-design-center.html

4. Lowe's Style Studio: Kitchen Design in VR, with an Associate

Lowe's Innovation Labs built Style Studio for Apple Vision Pro, released it in February 2024 and then took it into stores (HBS Dealer). It's the clearest example of when headset VR earns its place: a high-ticket project, dozens of linked decisions, and a store associate in the room.

What shoppers do:

Step into a full-scale 3D kitchen, start from a style created by Lowe's designers, and change materials, fixtures and appliances — Lowe's counts nearly 80 billion possible combinations. In the Austin pilot, sessions ran 45 minutes, and family members could follow along on an iPad.

Path to purchase:

The session ends with a product list saved to the shopper's Lowes.com account, and the design can be shared as a PDF with a contractor or designer.

The lesson for retailers:

Put VR where an associate already sells, not on the website. The headset is a tool for a guided session, and what matters at the end is a saved product list, not the "wow."

Limits:

It takes a device that starts at $3,499, an appointment and a trained associate, so it reaches only a handful of stores. Research supports the caution: VR product presentations help only with the right kinds of interaction, not by default (Journal of Retailing, 2026). And a study of 50 shoppers using a VR catalog and configurator in a furniture store measured how they felt about the experience — not whether they bought more (Future Internet, 2022).

5. Automotive Virtual Showrooms: Kia's 3D Dealership That Ends with a Reservation

This is the only example from outside home retail, and it earned its place on the list because it shows how far the format can go: the virtual showroom doesn't end with inspiration, it ends with a reserved car. Car brands moved the first half of the showroom visit online years ago — shoppers configure at home and go to the dealer for the test drive and the deal. Kia's virtual showroom in Mexico, a 3D dealership in the browser with several models on display, is a good example.

What shoppers do:

Pick a model, change the paint and wheels, play feature videos from hotspots and save a photo of their configuration. On the sales floor, they walk around the car and sit inside.

Path to purchase:

The shopper picks the trim, color, interior and a local dealer, sees the total price, and reserves the car for a MXN 2,000 deposit. The dealer completes the sale.

What to borrow:

Configure online, close in person. A modular sofa or a made-to-order dining set can work the same way: the shopper builds it, holds it with a small deposit and picks the store that will finish the sale.

Limits:

This depth of 3D pays off for a small lineup with many options per model, where every car is a high-ticket sale. A retailer with thousands of simpler products has to choose where that investment makes sense.

See it: Kia Virtual Experience

6. Valolma (Powered by Zolak): Curtains on a Photo of the Shopper's Own Room

Full disclosure: Valolma is a Zolak client, and this experience runs on our product. We've described it the same way as the other examples, limits included.

Curtains are hard to buy online. Color shifts with daylight, pattern scale changes with window size, and made-to-measure orders often can't be returned. Finnish made-to-measure curtain brand Valolma answers the question a fabric swatch can't by letting shoppers see curtains on their own window. The tool runs on Zolak Showroom with the User Interior Visualization add-on and opens from a "See it in your room" button in the site header.

What shoppers do:

Upload a photo of their room, remove old curtains or other objects from it, and hang Valolma curtains on the window — including several layers at once, such as sheers behind curtains. Each item goes into an order list next to the photo.

Path to purchase:

From the order list, the shopper goes straight to the product page. There they choose the fabric color, enter the finished length, rail width and number of panels, and see the price calculated for their size, then add it to the cart.

What to borrow:

Let each tool do its own job. The visualizer answers "how will it look," and the product page, with its measuring guide, handles the exact size. Valolma didn't have to rebuild its made-to-measure checkout to add visualization.

Limits:

A photo captures one lighting moment, and the visualization shows style and color, not the final dimensions — those still depend on the shopper measuring correctly.

See it: https://valolma.com/?showroom

"Zolak is not just a service provider, they are a trusted partner — professional, knowledgeable, and deeply committed to delivering the best possible results." — Emilia Peltola, Owner, Valolma

Which Virtual Showroom Format Fits Your Store?

Start with two questions. What is your shopper unsure about: how a collection looks when styled, whether a piece will fit their own room, or which configuration to order? And what do you already have to work with: a well-merchandised showroom, 3D models of your products, or staff who sell in person?

Product 3D viewers and AR placement are building blocks rather than showroom formats on their own. Most of the examples above use them inside a larger room or collection experience.

Conclusion

None of these formats wins everywhere. The right one answers the question your shoppers can't answer from a product page.

If you want to show a collection the way it looks in a well-styled room, start with designed 3D interiors. Zolak Showroom gives you these scenes ready-made: we prepare rooms, larger spaces or outdoor areas for your brand, and shoppers furnish them with 3D products from your catalog, right on your site. IKEA built designed rooms for its own catalog; Zolak Showroom makes them available to any brand.

If shoppers hesitate because they can't picture the product at home, let them see it in their own room. That's the job of User Interior Visualization, the approach Valolma uses for curtains.

If you sell high-ticket projects in store and have staff to guide each session, headset VR can be worth testing — as a sales tool for a few locations, not a channel for every shopper. And if your best customers buy through a consultation, take a page from Kia: let the virtual space end with a booked appointment rather than a cart.