The Foundry
The Foundry is a niche technology provider for the film and television industry, developing software plug-ins to extend the functionality of post-production compositing applications.
The Foundry's new e-commerce site, developed by Chameleon Net, handles complex pricing, dynamic software licensing and multi-currency purchases to provide Foundry products online to a worldwide customer base.
Highly respected in the industry
For those in the Film and Video post-production industry, the Foundry's products are a constant standby. They are essential software plug-ins - or 'sparks' - for the major post-production software packages that make the Film and Video industry tick.
The Foundry's plugins include colour manipulation, effects correction, and blue/green screen keying for platforms like Avid, Discreet and Adobe After Effects.
This niche software is extremely well regarded in the industry, and has been used in scores of films including Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Resident Evil, Notting Hill, Sleepy Hollow, The Big Lebowski, and Mission Impossible to name but a few.
A departure in e-commerce
Until now post-production houses couldn't buy Foundry plug-ins online. A standard e-commerce package would not have been able to handle their requirements.
Jonathan Barson, Managing Director at The Foundry, explained: "Most of our sales are overseas to customers in different time zones. Allowing customers to buy online at any time of day or night was an obvious step to improve our service. Chameleon Net have also implemented rental licenses for our plug-ins - a first in our industry."
He continued: "Our customers found our previous site confusing and difficult to find their way around. Chameleon Net have delivered a new site with vastly improved navigation and search functions. This combined with the online purchasing system has given us a great leap forward."
The Foundry teamed up with Soho Square-based e-commerce specialist Chameleon Net, whose development skills have delivered a site that provides an online purchase mechanism for Foundry's plug-ins, dynamically creates unique licence keys, and crucially guides customers through the buying process.
The site not only allows people to buy, but also to trial individual Foundry plug-ins prior to purchase, download patches, and access support information such as user guides and release notes.