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 November 23, 2004 Web Retailing Gets Really Personal The Internet keeps advancing the art of customization. Made-to-order jeans are just the start. How about dolls that look like your child? Remember when the ultimate in personalizing a gift was adding a monogram? Today inscribing initials on luggage or towels seems quaintly old-fashioned compared to what's available on the Web. Thanks to improvements in software that display customized goods online, guide users through the selection process, and automate production, individualizing a gift has gotten far more sophisticated -- and, dare we say, trendy -- this holiday season. Want a unique gift for a young girl? Log onto www.MyTwinn.com. For $119 you can choose the doll's hair, skin, and eye color as well as experiment with face shapes and hair styles. CUSTOM FEATURES. Go really crazy and send in a photo -- you can have the child's freckle pattern replicated on the actual doll. "There are 42,000 combinations of dolls available without doing anything special," says Gary Lindsey, vice-president for marketing with eToys, which purchased 12-year-old MyTwinn out of bankruptcy and just relaunched the doll line on Oct. 1. MyTwinn uses software from Montreal-based My Virtual Model. For parents trying to create a doll that looks like their child, it's a remarkable, if unsettling, technology to experiment with. How about putting a new fleece jacket under the tree for your running fanatic husband? A Marinac jacket is the latest in customizable clothing from LandsEnd.com, where an average of 27% of its online sales in "tailor-made" categories like jeans, men's dress shirts, and chinos are now for made-to-order goods, says Bert Kolz, director of Lands' End e-commerce business. The Marinac jacket, which debuted in September, comes in a custom fit and a variety of colors and fabrics. It can also be made with add-ons like thumb loops, underarm ventilation slits, and a key clip. "This time we wanted to make customization more about features than fit, Kolz says. Why stop there? Turn to www.NikeiD.com and you can get your hubby a pair of customized running shoes. Choose the style, design, and even get his name printed on the heel. MORE SELECTIONS. Of course, not much of this is new except for the variety of choices. Custom-made products have been around forever. The industry term for the technology that powers the trend today is "mass customization" (see BW Cover Story, 7/12/04, "The Vanishing Mass Market"). Dell ( DELL ) is still the king of made-for-order on the Web with nearly all of its $47 billion in annual sales falling into that category. Levi Strauss started selling custom jeans from its stores in 1999. What's changed is that, thanks to the Web, a broader variety of custom products have become more accessible and affordable. For many goods, the extra fee is only $10 to $20, and delivery time is usually up to four weeks. In the past, custom was necessarily a high-end item. Not anymore. At Target ( TGT ) you can order custom jeans for about $35. That's about 50% higher than the $23 off-the-rack price, but still hardly a painful premium. Only in the past year or so have retailers reached a point when they're ready to roll out the services more broadly, says Patti Freeman Evans, a retail analyst at Jupiter Research. "People had to get their basic services down before they could really start customizing in a big way," she says. SMARTER SOFTWARE. This new era of personalization is fueled by two main tech developments. New software on the back end has made it possible to make customization more profitable. And on the front end, new technology makes all the options easier to present to consumers. One techno-empowerer of customization is Robert Holloway, chief executive of Archetype Solutions, an Emeryville (Calif.) company that automates custom clothing for Lands' End ( S ), Target, and JC Penney ( JCP ). His software turns measurements submitted by customers into a unique pattern that's sent to manufacturers, which use computerized cutting machines and hand sewing to produce the garment and ship it direct to the customer. The software is more sophisticated than you might think. "There is a predictive quality to it," says Holloway, formerly of Levi's. "Since not everyone tells the truth." Men tend to overestimate their inseam and underestimate their waist size, he says, so the software adjusts. "Women are surprisingly realistic," he says. COOL CREATIONS. Also steering this new evolution in online personalization is Doug Mack, chief executive of Scene7, whose software creates the images behind such offerings as the National Football League's new "create your own jersey" program and Pottery Barn Kids' custom seating collection. Scene7 software allows customers to zoom in on a fabric, swap different colors or styles, and emboss a name on the item -- magically "seeing" a photo image of the finished product. "The end result is perfectly photo-realistic," Mack says. By looking at the images on the Web, "the customer would never know these items are virtual," he says. "Plus you get results served up really fast." Mack believes presenting the customized merchandise realistically is key to the popularity of the new personalized products. "We're really breaking the touch-and-feel barrier on the Web." Customization isn't a sure thing, Freeman Evans warns. The business model has to make sense. Customers, who are likely to have high expectations, have to be happy with the product they receive. "If you don't do it well, it can be dicey," she says. LIMITLESS OPTIONS. A couple of sites, she says, are doing it right. One is Chipndough.com, which lets you select cookies and put a photo of yourself on the tin. She also praises T-shirt maker ChoiceShirts.com and "build your own bag" company Timbuk2. And Lands' End gets kudos for letting customers return the goods, a rarity in personalization world. Are customized products really better? For certain kinds of clothing, yes, but not all, says Lands' End's Kolz, who envisions a future with many more options for personalizing products from Lands' End. "But would you need to customize socks?" he asks. Maybe not. But now that so many more retailers and consumers are willing to experiment, the made-to-order possibilities on the Web seem truly limitless. Yes, that means monogrammed socks, too. Copyright 2000-2004, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved. |
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