Medalounger: a dining chair configurator for the website, showroom and fairs

Medalounger is a family furniture company in Bornem, Belgium, and the maker of MODULAX furniture. The family has worked in furniture since 1957, and MODULAX by Medalounger began in the late 1980s with a single piece, the recliner. Under the third generation it now furnishes the whole home: dining tables and chairs, bar chairs, cabinets, sofas, coffee tables and TV stands, recliners, accent chairs, beds, night stands and benches. Its website, modulax.be, presents the range as a catalogue without prices, with separate enquiry forms for consumers and for professionals and a web portal for trade customers.

The chairs are where the range branches out most, so that is where Medalounger began. It has built 51 configurators in Simplio3D for its dining chairs, bar chairs and recliners, one per model, all drawing on one library of 161 materials, and since July 2026 they have been on modulax.be. Each dining chair configurator lets the chair be upholstered in fabric or leather, from twenty fabric collections and four leather ones, with its leg finish, and the bar chairs add five leg models in two seat heights. The configurators were made for three audiences at once: visitors to the website, the sales staff in the showroom, and the people who stop at the MODULAX stand at furniture fairs.

The solution: a dining chair configurator behind every Configure button

On modulax.be each chair has a product page with its description, its features and materials, and schematics to download. On the chairs with a configurator, a Configure this product button leads to the chair’s own configurator page, and on the dining chairs the description already points the way: “Find out the materials and color options in the configurator below.”

The configurator fills that page. The chair turns and zooms in 3D on a cream background beside a beige panel, both styled with the project’s branding settings. For the Cyril dining chair, with its separate headrest, conical legs and 360-degree swivel, the panel asks for the material, then the collection, then the colour, then the colour of the legs. The bar chairs begin with one more question, the leg model. A toolbar folded away at the right edge holds Reset Camera and Take Snapshot, which downloads a high-resolution PNG of the chair as configured, with a transparent background.

How 161 materials fit in one small panel

Laid out at once, 150 fabrics and leathers would be a wall of swatches. Each configurator reveals them in steps instead. The first dropdown asks for fabric or leather. Pick fabric, and a second dropdown lists the twenty collections; pick a collection, and only its colours appear, as swatches named after the fabric’s code: ENERGY 05, ENERGY 34, ENERGY 96 and ENERGY 101 for Energy. Leather works the same way, with its four collections. Conditional rules decide what is shown: a collection’s swatches appear only when that collection is chosen, and the fabric swatches give way to the leather ones when leather is picked.

The bar chairs start one step earlier, with the leg model: Leg A or Leg B at a 65 or 75 cm seat height, or Leg C. Each leg model has its own seat in the 3D model, so every collection is set up once per leg model, and the rules show the swatches for the legs that were chosen. Eight chairs, among them Zenith and the Ferrara dining and bar chairs, also take a separate seat and cover material, each with its own choice of fabric or leather. That keeps the panel to the choices that go with the ones already made.

The swatches come from Simplio3D’s shared material library. Each collection is a material category, and each swatch set is a Select Material block in its From Category mode, which creates one swatch per material in the category. A colour added to a collection in the library therefore appears in every configurator that offers that collection the next time it loads, without editing a single project. Every fabric and leather is a textured material, nearly all of them with a normal map, so the weave and the grain show on the chair.

The same configurators online, in the showroom and on the fair stand

The configurators were made for more than the website. Medalounger’s sales staff use the same ones in the showroom, and the company wants them on its stand at furniture fairs too, so that visitors can explore the many variations of its chairs more easily. MODULAX exhibits at furniture fairs in Europe and in China: its news pages list M.O.W. 2025 in Bad Salzuflen (Hall 20), the Brussels Furniture Fair 2025 (stand 5-104), Messe C. Fredericia in Denmark, INDX and Furniture China 2023 in Shanghai.

A showroom floor or a fair stand holds a handful of chairs in a handful of fabrics. With a configurator, a salesperson can show the chairs and fabrics that are not on show: the chair in front of them in any of the twenty fabric collections or four leathers, a bar chair moved from a 65 to a 75 cm seat, and a snapshot of the result to keep. A visitor who later opens modulax.be finds the same chairs with the same choices. Many come as a dining chair and a matching bar chair, among them Bari, Messina and Padua, with the same collections on both, so a dining room and its bar can be planned in one fabric.

What a configurator does for a furniture range like this

Medalounger’s setup follows a pattern that suits most upholstered furniture, where every model multiplies by its fabrics, its leathers and its frames:

• The whole range, not just the samples. A showroom or a stand shows a few chairs in a few fabrics. A configurator shows every model in every fabric, so the floor can carry the best sellers and the configurator the rest.
• The fabric on the chair, not on a card. A sample book shows a square of fabric. A textured material shows it on the chair’s own shape, seams and legs.
• Only combinations that can be made. Conditional logic shows, hides or restricts options based on earlier choices, so a leg, a fabric or a part that a model does not take is never offered.
• One library for every product. A material is created once in the shared library and reused across projects. With From Category swatch sets, a new colour reaches every configurator that offers its collection.
• The same answer everywhere. When the website, the showroom and the fair use the same configurators, customers find the same options wherever they meet the brand, and the sales team works from the same catalogue as the website.
• Pictures on demand. Take Snapshot saves the configured chair as a high-resolution PNG with a transparent background, ready for an offer, a mood board or a message to a client.
• Updates without starting over. A 3D model can be replaced with a new version while the configuration built on it is kept, so a revised chair keeps its options.

The 3D furniture configurator and 3D chair configurator pages cover the other options, from dimensions to pricing.

What a project like this would add today

None of this section is part of the MODULAX configurators described above. They already run on the current version of Simplio3D, so each of these features could be added to them:

• The chair in the customer’s room. Augmented reality places the configured chair on the floor through a phone, with no app: AR Quick Look on iOS and Scene Viewer on Android. On a computer, the AR button shows a QR code that opens the configured chair on a phone, a handoff that lasts 24 hours, which suits a fair stand.
• A request that carries the chair. A quote or contact form captures the configuration together with the customer’s details, and submissions are reviewed under Requests in the Simplio3D dashboard. On a stand, a visitor’s chosen chair could leave as a request rather than a note.
• The details on the model. Hotspots add markers with information pop-ups, for the 360-degree auto-return swivel, say, or the two seat heights of the bar chairs.
• A summary of the choices. The toolbar can also hold a configuration summary that lists the choices made, which these configurators leave out.
• The next chairs, faster. A first configurator for a new model can be generated from a written description, and the AI assistant can audit option coverage and conditional logic, for example that every dropdown choice leads to swatches and every swatch has its material, and propose repairs. An AI client such as Claude, connected to the workspace over MCP with a scoped connection, can run the same checks, and changes to prices or SKUs only ever arrive as pending changes that a person applies.