TUBS Virtual Showroom

A 30,000 sq ft bath and plumbing showroom — TUBS — turned into a walkable virtual tour during COVID lockdowns. When the floor was forced to close to in-person visitors for months at a time, the virtual tour did the work that would have walked in the door otherwise. Designers spec’d from home, trade buyers shortlisted on the phone, and end customers from outside the GTA — some from outside Canada — bought from the tour without ever stepping inside.

The COVID context — why the tour was built

When lockdowns hit, TUBS faced the same problem every premium retail showroom did: a high-touch shopping experience that depended on walking the floor, suddenly inaccessible. Closing for months at a time wasn’t a marketing problem. It was a revenue problem.

The build started as a way to keep the floor open during shutdowns. It became one of the only fully virtual online bathroom showrooms available in the world at the time — and it kept selling when the doors were locked.

The numbers it generated

• $600K+ in net-new business closed in the first three months of the tour going live during lockdown.
• One $80K sale from a US client — a buyer outside Ontario who TUBS would never have reached through the brick-and-mortar floor — grew to over $250K of revenue from that same client in the first year.
• 5,000 impressions in year one of the tour.
• 20,000+ lifetime impressions and 17,500+ views as of today — a tour built in 2020 still generating buyer traffic five years later.

The single $80K-to-$250K story is the one the team comes back to. That client lived in the United States. Without the tour, TUBS had no way to put a 30,000 sq ft floor in front of someone who couldn’t fly in. With the tour, they walked it, tagged what they wanted, asked questions over email, and bought.

What sits inside the build

Walkable virtual tour with mini-map navigation

Three view modes — inside, floor plan, and dollhouse — let visitors navigate the floor however they prefer. The mini-map in the corner gives them a marker, a direction, and a tap-to-jump shortcut between sections of the 30,000 sq ft floor.

Branded product directory with search

Every product is filed in the directory by brand and category, with a search bar for instant SKU lookup. The brand chips along the top match the lines on the floor — TOTO, Neptune, Dimplex, Zomodo, Vanico, Fairmont, Rubi, Fluerco, Franke, House of Rohl, Masco, Aura, Kohler, AD Waters, Rubinet.

Ultra-tier tags — the feature that closed the US deal

The product directory tells you what’s somewhere on the floor. The tags tell you what’s on every fixture you’re looking at right now. The two screenshots below show the same vantage point — first the raw tour, then the same view with every taggable product surfaced.

Every product on the floor carries a tag with its code and description. Selected fixtures got the full Ultra treatment — a single tag opened a panel with the product image, spec sheet PDF, installation manual, installation video, a 3D model preview, and a buy-now link. A buyer in another country could research, watch a fixture install end-to-end, confirm dimensions against their bathroom rough-in, and place the order without leaving the tour.

That depth of information at the tag level is what made it possible to close large remote orders. A spec sheet on a website isn’t enough. A tour with a tagged spec sheet, an install video, and a 3D model anchored to the actual fixture on the floor — that’s enough.

Scan coverage — every position across the 30,000 sq ft floor

The density isn’t decoration. Each blue dot is a 360° capture, and the tag layer depends on having enough viewpoints that every product is unambiguously identified — no ghost fixtures, no missing angles, no “is that the Franke or the TOTO” guesswork. The directory and the spec sheets only work because the scan itself goes deep enough first.

What the tour does today

It still opens the floor outside business hours and beyond city limits. Designers spec from the tour. Trade buyers walk through and shortlist before they ever drive in. The same record powers TUBS’s website embed, their email campaigns, and their onboarding material for new sales staff.

Five years in, the tour is still pulling new impressions every month — a one-time scan that has paid back hundreds of times over.