VOVANCE

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am a department head at GWA Group Limited

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

GWA Group Limited is a major Australian public company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange under the ticker ASX: GWA. It designs, supplies, and markets building fixtures and fittings for bathrooms, kitchens, and laundries, with a primary focus on sustainable and water-efficient solutions.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire VOVANCE to accomplish?

• Let plumbers and trade customers identify parts from a photo instead of searching a catalogue by name or SKU. A plumber uploads an image of any plumbing part, and the system returns visually matching products from Caroma's catalogue instantly.
• Match against a catalogue of 10,000+ products with accuracy high enough for field use. The core challenge in visual search is false positives — a naive image-matching approach returns visually adjacent but categorically wrong results
• Handle real-world trade photos, not clean product shots: parts photographed on site under poor lighting, at odd angles, partially installed, or dirty — while still returning the correct catalogue match.
• Return results fast enough to be usable on a job — near-instant response against the full catalogue, so the tool fits into a plumber's workflow rather than interrupting it.
• Prove feasibility before full commitment. The engagement opened with a working demo and a discovery phase to validate the approach against Caroma's real catalogue and constraints, then moved into a full production build — de-risking a novel computer-vision problem rather than committing blind

SOLUTION

How did you find VOVANCE?

Online Search

Why did you select VOVANCE over others?

High ratings

How many teammates from VOVANCE were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Vovance designed and built an AI reverse image search system for Caroma (GWA Group), letting plumbers and trade customers identify products from a photograph rather than by part number or catalogue browsing. A user uploads an image of any plumbing part and the system returns visually matching products from Caroma's catalogue of 10,000+ SKUs in near real time.

The engineering challenge was precision at scale: distinguishing genuinely similar parts from superficially similar ones, so results are categorically correct rather than merely visually adjacent — the failure mode that undermines naive image-matching approaches. The system was built to handle real-world trade photography — poor lighting, awkward angles, partial or installed parts — and return reliable matches under those conditions, at a latency low enough to fit a plumber's on-site workflow. Delivered as a production solution integrated against Caroma's live product catalogue.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• Top-k match accuracy — 95% of searches where the correct part appears in the top results
• Search latency — 2.1 seconds

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

VOVANCE demonstrated strong project management throughout the engagement. They communicated clearly, kept the project moving according to the agreed timeline, and were responsive to our feedback and changing requirements. They took a structured approach by first validating the concept through a working demo and discovery phase before moving into the production build. Overall, deliverables were completed on time, and the team was proactive and solution-oriented whenever we raised questions or needed adjustments.

What was your primary form of communication with VOVANCE?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

What impressed us most was VOVANCE’s ability to solve a genuinely challenging AI and computer-vision problem rather than relying on a simple image-matching approach. They focused heavily on reducing false positives and making the system work with real-world photos taken by plumbers in difficult conditions. Their ability to take the project from an initial feasibility demo through to a production-ready solution, while achieving around 95% top-k accuracy and 2.1-second search latency across 10,000+ products, was particularly impressive.

The team understood the complexity of the project, communicated well, responded quickly to our needs, and successfully delivered a production-ready solution. We were particularly impressed with the accuracy, performance, and ability to handle challenging real-world images. Overall, VOVANCE was a reliable and highly capable technology partner, and we would be happy to work with them again.

Are there any areas for improvement or something VOVANCE could have done differently?

VOVANCE performed very well throughout the project. If anything, they could continue to build on their strong approach by providing even more detailed documentation and knowledge transfer at the end of complex AI projects. This would make it easier for internal teams to understand the solution and maintain it independently. Overall, there were no major areas of concern, and we were very satisfied with their work.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the director of technology at Solo Health. We're a self-funded, captive-based major medical health plan designed exclusively for self-employed business owners.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenges were you trying to address with VOVANCE?

Initially, we brought Vovance on to help us launch our enrollment and e-commerce platform. Over the five years since, the scope has expanded significantly — we now rely on them for product development, platform architecture, IT security, and AI engineering across the business.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

VOVANCE has built and continues to maintain our core enrollment and e-commerce platform, handling everything from the initial architecture through ongoing feature development. Their scope has grown to include platform and IT security, infrastructure management, and more recently, AI engineering work supporting internal tools. They've also supported CRM and marketing automation integrations tied to our sales and enrollment funnel. Across five years, they've functioned as our de facto engineering team rather than an outside contractor.VOVANCE has built our core platform on Adobe Commerce (Magento) for enrollment and checkout, backed by a Laravel-based transaction system that serves as the authoritative record for member orders. They've handled integrations connecting that platform to our CRM, billing, and records systems, along with security hardening across the front end as we've scaled.On the AI side, they've supported engineering work around GPT-4-based tools and a voice AI system for our call center, both built with HIPAA compliance requirements in mind given the healthcare data involved.

What was the team composition?

We work with 2–5 teammates from VOVANCE.

How did you come to work with VOVANCE?

We found them through an online search. We chose them because of the wide array of services they provided.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in January 2021, and our engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

On the platform VOVANCE built and maintains, we've grown from roughly 230 transactions in our first full year (2022) to over 2,250 in 2025 — nearly 10x — with purchase volume scaling from about $58,000 to $1.3 million, more than 20x, over the same period. That momentum has carried into 2026: in the first half of the year alone, we've already processed over 1,100 transactions and roughly $575,000 in volume, on pace to exceed the prior year again.Just as important, all of this growth happened without a single re-platforming or major rebuild — the architecture VOVANCE designed absorbed a more than 20x increase in volume while staying stable and compliant. Every time the business needed new capability, they delivered it fast enough to keep pace, so the platform has never been the bottleneck to our growth.Across this entire period of rapid growth, the platform has remained stable and secure — we've never experienced a security incident or a compliance issue in our time working with VOVANCE. 
That's not trivial given we operate in healthcare and scaled to more than 20x our transaction volume over this period. VOVANCE built the platform with HIPAA requirements as a design constraint from the start and has hardened it continuously as we've grown, rather than treating security as an afterthought. The clearest proof point is simply that the infrastructure absorbed that entire growth curve without disruption, breach, or compliance gap.We maintain a 4.6 out of 5 rating on Trustpilot across our verified member reviews, which reflects the experience members have with the platform VOVANCE built. Beyond that score, the behavioral signal is just as telling: members consistently return to add dental and vision coverage on top of their medical plans, and the book has grown steadily year over year rather than churning. That kind of repeat engagement only happens when enrollment and account management are genuinely easy — a direct reflection of the low-friction platform VOVANCE designed, where a business owner can complete sign-up in minutes.

How did VOVANCE perform from a project management standpoint?

Amit (Project Manager) has been our dedicated project manager throughout the engagement, and that continuity has made a real difference. He knows our business well enough to anticipate what we need rather than just executing tickets, and he's consistently kept projects moving even as scope has shifted or grown midstream — which happens often in a business like ours.Deliverables have come in reliably, and when timelines needed to adjust, we've had clear communication about it well in advance rather than surprises. Five years in, that consistency is a big part of why we've never felt the need to look elsewhere.We communicate via virtual meetings, emails, and messaging apps.

What did you find most impressive about them?

What's most impressive about VOVANCE is their willingness to go beyond the original scope of work. They didn't sign on for one project and stay locked to it — over five years, they've expanded with us into whatever the business needed next, whether that was core platform development, IT security, or more recently, AI engineering.Most vendors draw a hard line around their contract and hand you off elsewhere when something falls outside it. VOVANCE has consistently done the opposite: they take on the problem, figure out how to solve it, and become the team we call for virtually any technology need, not just the ones that were in the original agreement. That flexibility is rare, and it's the main reason the relationship has lasted this long.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The one area for growth would be attention to detail on the smaller things — occasionally, I've needed to do my own review pass before something goes live rather than treating delivery as final.