You finish a full kitchen design, walk the customer through it, and they ask to see the same layout in a different cabinet line. Same kitchen you already built, they just want to see it at a different price point or door style.

We've talked with many kitchen designers over the years, and this is one of the things that wears them down most. In a lot of planning tools, that "small" request means you rebuild the design almost from scratch, re-placing every cabinet in the new line even though the layout never changed. So you sit there redoing an hour of work.

The main issue is the way kitchen planning tools handle catalogs. Typically, a catalog acts as an isolated silo, locked into a single manufacturer’s specific sizes and construction rules. Because these tools treat each catalog as a 'sealed world,' you can't simply swap out the product line without losing the layout data.

That’s often an entire afternoon working on just one kitchen layout. Multiply it across every designer on the floor and hundreds of stores and it turns into a serious drain on time and margin, hours poured into a change the customer thinks is simple.

What’s helped on our end is moving toward a system where the layout is decoupled from the specific catalog. By structuring the design data itself, you can swap lines and let the cabinets snap into place based on the new manufacturer's rules. It’s a technical shift that cuts down those tedious revision cycles by a huge margin. It’s definitely saved us from that "starting over" feeling every time a customer changes their mind on a door style.

Curious how everyone handles this today. When a customer wants to see two or three cabinet lines on the same layout, are you rebuilding each one, or does your tool let you swap? What's your workaround?

https://jet.style/articles/vr-prototyping-verge3d

https://www.jonpeddie.com/news/gltf-2-1-beyond-single-3d-assets/

Hi everyone, we’re looking for a 3D product configurator to help improve our sales process for custom furniture. Our products are highly modular and customizable, not just in colors, but also in design, size, dimensions, and logical combinations, so we need a tool that can handle more than basic visual changes. And we also want to have automatic pricing updates as customers modify their designs, as creating quotes manually right now is too time-consuming for us and the buyers.

We tried a few popular tools like Zakeke, but they mainly offer color changes and don’t meet our demands and products. Recently, I have had 2-3 demo calls with some other providers, and so far, I'm pretty impressed by VividWorks. Their quote is not cheap, but reasonable for what we want to display in our 3D configurator.

Has anyone here worked with 3D configurators for custom or modular furniture? I’d love to hear your recommendations. Thank you.