A lamp you can switch on before it arrives

Grau makes Salt, a cordless table lamp, and sells it on its own Shopify store in eight colourways. A lamp like this is bought for a table it has never stood on: a desk, a bedside table, a shelf the buyer is picturing while they scroll.

Photographs on a product page do not answer the two questions that decide the purchase. How big is it, really, next to the things already on that table? And what does it look like once it is switched on, in the room it is meant to light? Both had to be answered on the product page itself, and the store team had to be able to put the answer there without anyone touching their theme. So: how do you let a buyer hold and switch on a lamp that is still in the warehouse?

A viewer for the Salt lamp. The visitor turns it, goes through the eight colourways, switches the light on and off, reads the real dimensions on the model itself and opens annotations that point at the details, the touch dimmer among them. From the same screen the lamp is placed in the visitor’s own room at true size. It is delivered as one link, and the store team embedded it in the Shopify product page themselves.

One model does all of it. The dimensions read 19 by 13 by 13 centimetres off the same model that goes into AR, so what is measured on screen is what stands on the table.

The light is switched on the model itself, not in a second set of pictures, so the lamp can be turned while lit, in every one of the eight colourways.

The founders reviewed it in several rounds and each round went back into the model until it matched what they expected. Delivery as a standalone embeddable link means the store team decides where it sits, and nothing in their theme depends on us.

The viewer is live. What the founders made of it is below, in their project lead’s words.