A modern product website with a loaded 3D configurator

The Czech furniture company Ton went through a rebrand, part of which involved launching a new website with a 3D configurator and an improved product catalog. And that's exactly what we built at Superkoders.

The clear centerpiece of Ton's new website is its 3D furniture configurator. The configurator itself was built by Bring Digital, and our job was to make sure it was fed the right, relevant data.

Once we'd nailed down exactly what data we needed for each product and variant, we had to figure out how to collect it and get it into the configurator. That was a challenge in itself.

The result is that customers can click together any chair, armchair, or table from Ton's range in the 3D configurator, choose from all the available parameters, and instantly see a realistic 3D model of the product on screen. Using their phone and augmented reality, they can then project that product into their own living room or kitchen and see how it would look in their home or office.

As developers, the first thing we had to do was understand the configurator's logic. That means knowing, for example, that if a customer picks caning in the chair configuration, different parameters come up than if they pick upholstery. That different parameters are relevant for oak chairs than for beech ones. I could go on like this for a while. At this stage, it wasn't about development — it was about understanding how manufacturing at Ton actually works.

Ton runs on the InMedias information system, with its own product information management setup that stores product data in a specific format. So alongside that, we built a system from scratch that pulls in the original product data, converts it into the format we need, keeps it updated, and then sends it off to be displayed in the configurator.

I'd go as far as to say that together with Bring Digital and Ton, we built the best 3D configurator on the Czech internet. The level of detail is incredible — for every single one of the hundreds of product variants, you can see exactly what you're buying.

And the client has kind words too:

Comparing our original configurator with the current one, it's like night and day. Now we have a truly full-featured, photorealistic 3D configurator, and we're already getting very positive feedback on it from customers.

Putting together the website itself — essentially a robust product catalog — was a breeze for us (and, thanks to great communication with the client, a pleasure too). We built it on PHP 8.2 with Elastic Search full-text search, and deployed our own SuperAdmin CMS on top of it for managing and editing content.

The Ton team only had two more specific requirements for the site:

• a login-gated business zone that unlocks access to certain non-public materials,
• and several language versions of the site that differ from one another — some don't show product prices, for instance, or have different contact people and conversion paths.

Neither requirement caught us off guard — we build similar functionality for clients regularly, and we've come to think of it as a kind of standard for what a good website should be able to do.

The real challenge on this project, on the other hand, was the deadline. The very first one slipped by a few weeks due to delays in the rebranding work, but once Ton's new project manager, Petr Kvapil, came on board, things picked up speed fast. Suddenly we had only about ten months to take a rough draft and turn it into a finished product ready for the Salone del Mobile trade fair in Milan that April.

When I joined in July 2023 and saw what stage the project was at, I honestly didn't believe we'd finish it by April 2024. Even in February, we were still missing a huge amount, especially on the business zone — it wasn't even a rough draft, more like a quarter-draft. But especially in the final stretch, Superkoders really put the pedal down and pulled off something close to a miracle.

The scope kept shifting under our hands along the way — we constantly had to work in ad-hoc feedback, and we got on a call every week to hash out what and how. Petr Kvapil adds:

I think it cost all of us a few sleepless nights, but in the end we made the April deadline. Sure, not everything is 100% finished, and there are still things we're fine-tuning and will keep fine-tuning, but the essentials were done in time. Big credit to the folks at Superkoders for that.

We're not the only ones happy about the new website — the client is too, and so are the expert juries who took notice. Over the course of 2024, the project picked up three major awards.

1st place, WebTop100
Large Company Website

2nd place, WebTop100
Product Design

1st place, Internet Effectiveness Awards
Consumer & Fast-Moving Goods

The awards confirm that we managed to combine striking design, a well-crafted product presentation, and solid technical execution into a website that doesn't just look good, but actually works in practice.