The Originals : Renault's digital museum created by Razorfish France

Headquarters: Boulogne-Billancourt, France

Technology stack: Nuxt.js, Magento, Storyblok

In a dynamic collaboration, Razorfish France (opens in a new window), a prominent arm of Publicis Groupe specializing in interactive experiences, has teamed up with Renault to craft a groundbreaking virtual museum titled "The Originals Renault. (opens in a new window)" This pioneering endeavor unites heritage and innovation, allowing visitors to seamlessly explore Renault's rich cultural legacy and historic automobile collection through a sophisticated digital lens. This immersive digital journey is ingeniously orchestrated by Storyblok which empowers Razorfish France with unparalleled creative control, intuitive content management, and real-time previews. The newly built fully immersive customer experience was launched in 6 months and is available in six languages.

Faced challenges

Solving the following challenges was essential to realize the vision of the virtual museum while overcoming time constraints, ensuring content management ease, facilitating user autonomy, and enhancing real-time preview capabilities.

• Time-to-Market: A critical challenge involved ensuring a swift time-to-market for the virtual museum. This required seamlessly creating and linking the necessary infrastructure to applications and content within a compressed time frame.
• Content Management Simplicity: A key objective was to simplify content management for both technical and non-technical users.
• User-Friendly Interface: Ensuring that the selected CMS offered an uncomplicated user interface was paramount. Demonstrating its effectiveness, Renault's content creators needed to independently manage content without external assistance.
• Real-time Visual Editing: An additional challenge was to empower users with the ability to preview modifications in real-time.

Storyblok solutions

One of the main objectives of the project was to create a fully immersive digital experience with no creative boundaries. Essentially, Razorfish France needed to have total control of the front end. The choice was easy: the right headless CMS. The headless CMS they chose was Storyblok for many reasons:

• First, time-to-market. Razorfish had already benchmarked Storyblok in the past and they knew they could get access, configure and test pages very quickly. They were able to create and connect the infrastructure to their applications and content within a short amount of time.
• Second, they chose Storyblok for the way we manage content and content types, using bloks. Our approach is very comprehensive and intuitive for non-technical users. 
• Another reason is the straightforward user interface. As proof, Renault content creators are able to manage the content without any external help.
• Last, but definitely not least, is the Visual Editor. Users were able to preview their modifications live in Storyblok, with very little configuration necessary from Razorfish France.

The Project

At the center of the brand is the emblematic car collection, with more than a century of history. In order to bring them to life realistically, Razorfish France leveraged an innovative mix of technologies called 3D Photogrammetry. This technology creates 3D models from a scan and a series of photos. It replicates all the subtle details of old vehicles’ materials (leather, wood, copper, plastic, fabrics, etc.) and the car’s exact silhouette. It also enables industrial processing of the 3D model and the creation of materials. This museum, available in six languages, is a premiere for the car industry and Renault became the first manufacturer to digitize their car collection.

Another noteworthy aspect of this project is the connecting of the museum with the business strategy. Specifically, the designed digital experience has been integrated with the museum’s e-shop. The digital journey of users is uninterrupted while they explore the car collection, hosting more than 50 models, and buying merchandise at the same time. 

A big challenge for both parties was the timeline of the project. However, they managed to develop this harmonious digital experience in less than six months. 

Onboarding the client

As per normal procedure, Razorfish France prepared extensive documentation for the museum and e-shop teams, thus enabling them to take over easily and quickly, and to operate Storyblok on their own to its full potential. Additionally, they organized 2-hour sessions with them, explaining the documentation and demonstrating the ease of use and admin of Storyblok. The sessions were recorded and made available for all future employees of Renault, to make sure that they all have access to the information. 

Moving forward

In the coming months, Razorfish will continue to expand the project with a number of assets.

They will increase the iconic collection with 80 more models and new products will be added to the merchandise e-shop by the end of the year. New services will be added and they will create lifestyle content to engage fans and visitors.

Razorfish France also plans to explore new areas of development with Renault, which, in their experience, has proved to be a very open and innovative client. They are looking, in the coming months and years, to develop new digital experiences via websites, apps, physical, motor shows and social media. Lastly, they are exploring what Renault’s role in the age of the NFT & metaverse might look like.