Movable Ink · 2018–2022 · Case study 03
A B2B AR platform, zero to $1M+
The company had no immersive product and no appetite for building an app. I argued that was the right instinct, and built the platform that proved it.
- My role
- Head of Immersive Technology, Product Manager
- What I owned
- Product definition, platform strategy, go-to-market, enablement
- Outcome
- $1M+ incremental revenue
Situation
Movable Ink sells personalised content into enterprise marketing teams. AR was arriving in that market as a novelty line item: agencies built one-off apps, brands paid a lot, and nothing was reusable. We wanted to offer our clients the capability in a way that made sense for annual billing scenarios.
The hard call
A web platform for marketers, not a stand-alone app
The obvious move in 2018 was a native app with good AR. I pushed the opposite way: web-based, drag-and-drop, built for the marketer rather than the end consumer.
What we gave up: fidelity. Native ARKit could do things the web could not, and our demos looked worse than an agency’s in a side-by-side.
What we got: no install step between a campaign and its audience, and a marketer who could ship an experience themselves without a development cycle, using the Movable Ink studio interface they were already using to build. That’s what turned AR from a project into a product line: recurring, self-serve, and priced like software.
What shipped
- Face Filter: drag-and-drop selfie effects a marketer could configure and launch.
- Visualizer: product visualisation for the “view it in your room” use case.
- Prototypes for Apple Vision Pro, to have a credible answer ready when clients asked what came next.
- Enablement: training for our own client-experience teams and for clients, because a self-serve product nobody knows how to sell is shelfware.
Outcome
$1M+ in incremental revenue from a product line that didn’t exist when I started, working with NBA, NEXT UK and IHOP alongside travel, CPG and non-profit brands. The work was recognised with the Most Effective AR/VR Campaign award for Virgin Holidays in 2019, and it established the company as a credible voice in a category it had no presence in.
I also mentored the cross-functional product, engineering and design teams that scaled it, which is the part that made it survive past me.
Why this is still here
It’s the oldest product work on this site and the least related to what I do now. It stays because it answers a question every hiring conversation eventually reaches: have you actually taken something from nothing to money? The AR itself matters less than the platform call behind it.