The Official Fluid Blog

Fluid (@Fluid) recently launched two customization-themed shopping experiences for Sears: Craftsman Custom and The Garage Planner.

Craftsman Custom delivers a premium experience for consumers to tailor a pro-quality tool storage solution to their specific needs and tastes. The experience leverages 3d visualization to deliver a blueprint-like experience that progressively builds into a photo-realistic vision of the consumer’s ideal product, all in real time.

The Sears Garage Planner experience is built on inspirations and “starting point” ideas. Consumers are presented with an interactive photo gallery of shoppable and customizable garage storage solutions. The experience is simultaneously inspirational and actionable, injecting the consumer with ideas and empowering them to make them their own.

Our team has a long history designing shopping experiences for customizable products, including …

• FunStamps (the first personalizable stamps offering)
• Timberland Boot Studio (custom footwear)
• Your Reebok (custom footwear) + facebook configurator
• Design Within Reach FLOR Designer (custom carpet configurator)
• Fine Stationery (card & stationery customizer)
• Vans Customs (custom footwear)

We’re fortunate to collaborate with such great brands to innovate new shopping experiences in such a nascent field. We’re proud to be among the first who have created configurators delivering consumers real-time visualization, product rotation, share-to-phone and integrated social sharing tools.

The business benefits of a better customization experience: 200%+ increase in sales, 16+ minute average consumer engagement on-site, spikes in sharing & heavy engagement with social media customization tools.

Some recent observations, field notes, and expectations looking forward:

• Before the “economic downturn” (or whatever it’s called now), Fluid was seeing RFPs for customization up approx 5-10x showing a sharp increase in interest across industries. The recession put most of those projects on hold.

• Those brands that continued forward became increasingly strategic around customization, seeing it as a brand and business building opportunity. In many cases increasing scope and decreasing timelines in an effort to get to market quickly with robust offerings (a differentiation/barrier strategy).

• Interestingly, over half of these brands are in verticals outside of footwear.

• Embedding up-sells in the customization experience has proven so effective that some retailers are pricing base models at-or-under cost and attaching costs per attribute selection (e.g. premium colors, extra set of laces, etc.).

• Providing the consumer with simple, intuitive social tools — both providing the ability to chat real-time with friends & ability to engage one’s facebook network without ever leaving the customization experience — has become a priority among most of our clients (and now considered a best practice within Fluid).

Finally, three predictions:

1. Customization experiences will take shape in ways that are more subtle and less overt – more about great digital shopping and less about “configurators” per se. This is what most consumers want. Thoughtful experiences that embed customization vs. customization being the main draw will help launch this consumer-driven approach to digital shopping into the mainstream.
2. Customization will make the notion of a crowd-sourced economy a reality. Champion and Keds are first movers (and got a lot of brand benefit as a result + some satisfaction at beating Nike to market I’m sure
3. Customizable shopping experiences will increasingly be deployed exclusively to social channels like facebook. Customizing something lends itself superbly to a community atmosphere – expect to see brands fully leveraging all that facebook has to offer in that regard.

My initial goal was to research and write a blog on sneakers, the sneaker culture, and what drives a ‘sneakerhead’ to seek the most limited/hard to get/wait-in-line-for-2 days type sneakers. But as I set out on my task to contribute to the Fluid blog, I stumbled onto the site miadidas.com. I say ‘stumbled’ because I have not heard or seen much about this site. I knew about NikeID, YourReebok(formerly known as RBKCustom), and the newly updated Vans Custom site among others, but was surprised and somewhat disappointed about just discovering the custom site for Adidas shoes. I’ve seen the in-store experience at the Adidas store in San Francisco, but was not aware it was migrated to the web – or at least a version of it.

With that said, I decided to focus my attention to the site and give my personal review. (more…)

The other night I let my son configure a pair of Vans slip-ons for his 6th birthday. Watching him and his 3 year old brother navigate the process was informative. Two key things I observed:

• My son moused-over every single option for every single product part (not kdding…he methodically moused over every option). This was only possible because Fluid Configure uses client-side technology (Adobe Flex in this case) to do the image previewing, meaning you don’t need a round trip to the server to generate the image.  Using server-side imaging technology this could take an hour or more.
• My 3 year old son asked, “Can we turn it over?” Specifically, even as an observer to the process he wanted to view the product from multiple perspectives. While Vans doesn’t feature the incredible rotation of Your Reebok, but it does show the product from multiple views with great responsiveness.

Overall it was gratifying to see them  quickly grasp the experience, move through the configuration process and take great pleasure from the emails and SMS’s they were able to send letting their family know about the shoes they had just designed. If only the design of their shoes could have been so positive.

At Fluid we’ve delivered some interesting work in the past: Timberland’s Build Your Own Boot Studio (BYOB) was a breakthrough in product configuration, offering instant color change and the first rotation of a custom product. Reebok built upon this by allowing two axes of rotation as well as allowing shoppers to configure a product on a lifestyle photograph. The recent launch of the new Vans configurator, is one of the most exciting client launches during my time at Fluid.

The Vans work builds on many of our learnings of the past years:

• Designing a custom product is stressful. One of the biggest impediments to custom product sales has been the inability to get immediate validation on a design in real time. In the Vans configurator a shopper can send a link to a friend via instant messenger (or email). When the user clicks the link they’ll be brought into a collaborative shopping session where they can share design ideas and give feedback in real time. We believe this will not only increase sales but bring new shoppers to the Vans site.
• Product configuration is an iterative undertaking. We’re providing users a simple “Scratchpad” where they can save their designs in progress for easy reference without logging in. With the scratchpad users can save a design with a single click and return to a previous design just as quickly.
• All of this functionality is part of the Fluid Retail product suite, utilizing both Fluid Configure and Fluid Social. This means we’ll be able to deploy the technology faster and more cost effectively for future customers looking to create similar collaborative shopping experiences.

We couldn’t be more excited to share this client work with you…keep your eyes peeled for future deployments of Fluid Social collaborative shopping deployed in support of collaborative shopping for traditional, mainline products.

This is the second in a series of posts based on my presentation (”Can I get that in pink and eggplant?”) about the future of customer experience online at the Web Experience Forum in Boston on 14 October 2008.

Mass Customization and Manufacture-on-Demand

Customized products are the ultimate in personalization: customers can select from many options for many attributes to create a product that is unique. This level of customization is made possible my manufacture-on-demand processes. Finished products are not stored in inventory to be picked, packed, and shipped – they are actually manufactured when the order is received.

A potential hazard of customization is that it creates more choice, possibly too much choice, for the consumer. Much has been studied and written about the paradox of choice and decision paralysis, but it boils to situations where there are so many options from which to choose that the consumer is overwhelmed, and it is actually easier to make no choice (and abort the purchase) than to make any choice. When customers are presented with many customizable components, each with many configurable options, the number of combinations may be overwhelming. Therefore we need to design customer experiences that help customers get started, make decisions, support their choices, and encourage them to proceed and complete the process.

One way we can craft more inviting experiences is to manage the number of choices people are given and how they are presented. A manufacture-on-demand process does not need to be transparent to the customer – they do not need to know when products are stocked in inventory versus made when an order is placed.

At the discreet end of the continuum, customers never even know that they are ordering a custom product, because the merchant has pre-defined all of the options and choices (e.g., notebook color, binding, and cover image) and presents the product as a ready-made item. Even though the customer makes no choices beyond selecting a quantity, when the order is placed that product is manufactured.

At the limited level of the customization continuum, consumers realize that they are ordering a customized product, but they may not realize the extent to which that product may actually be customized, because the merchant has pre-defined some some of the options (e.g., ink color and envelope interior pattern) but left a few for the customer to specify (e.g., text on the notecard and the font.) The product is still manufactured when the order is placed, but the number of choices has been controlled to make the personalization process simpler and faster.

Finally, at the level of full customization, consumers realize they are are ordering a customized product, and they understand that it will be manufactured just for them when the order is placed. (Curiously, some customers still think that all variations on custom products have been manufactured in advance and stored in a warehouse awaiting selection and shipment when an order is placed, because they may not fully realize the number of combinations possible and that it would not be feasible to make every possible version of a product.) The choices and options are numerous, and the messaging about the product and customization service typically makes it clear that a product is being made just for the consumer according to their specifications.

There are web sites already offering mass customization of products, and we are likely to see more and more as the ability to manufacture-on-demand becomes more widespread. Today, manufacturing-on-demand is often limited to a base set of products (e.g., photo mugs and mousepads) to which a custom pattern, color, or text may be applied, or to products that have manufacturing processes that lend themselves more easily to mass customization (e.g., custom shoes.)

Cafe Press and Zazzle both offer a set of base products from which to begin. Customers then add their own personal touches and select from a few options to create products that are uniquely their own and which are manufactured-on-demand.

Reebok offers full-customization of shoes, and consumers have the ability to design their own shoe selecting from so many choices that there are literally trillions of possible combinations. A unique product is actually possible, and there is no way that Reebok could manufacture and stock all possible variations of the shoes – this is made possible only my manufacture-on-demand processes.

The manufacture-on-demand process and the ability to create custom products also quickly and easily opens up the opportunity for online, digital equivalent of “pop-up stores.” Pop-up stores are temporary physical retail stores that open for a short time in a previously empty location, generate buzz and attention, respond to a trend or community need, sell for a limited time, then close and disappear. Companies that have the ability to manufacture-on-demand could respond quickly to current trends, fads, and styles by pre-defining products, opening a temporary web site, and selling those products either under their brand or as an ephemeral brand. They could offer limited edition products, different products for different geographics regions, or even products that are offered only to existing customers. Once the ephemeral brand has run its course, the web site disappears.

Custom products are more than just choice for the consumer, they are also opportunities for the companies that are able to manufacture-on-demand, who want to differentiate their product offering, and who are able to quickly and nimbly respond to styles, fads, and market trends.

I will be presenting at the Web Experience Forum in Boston on October 14 and discussing the future of online customer experience in a session titled “Can I Get That in Pink and Eggplant?”  Here’s the blurb for the session:

“As more and more retail purchases occur on the Web, the ability to portray products as if they were in the buyers’ hands will become one of the key drivers of an excellent Web experience. Color change, product configuration, magnification, rotation, and personalization are already mainstream features expected by and familiar to consumers. What will online customers want next, and what do they not even realize we can offer? What is the next level of Web experience we need to attain to drive growth in Web transactions? This presentation will look at how emerging technologies and innovative design will transform the Web experience in the coming years.”

I don’t want to give everything away before the session (and I don’t think the folks at the Web Experience Forum would appreciate it), but here are some hints about what we see in the next two to five years:

• Video is the next JPEG,
• Sites will be smarter and more aware of who we are and what we like,
• Mass customization of products, whether or not we realize it,
• Sites will relinquish total control of the experience and become deconstructed,
• Mobile devices will be links and keys in much larger experiences,
• Social, social, social!

Check back the week of October 20 for start of six installments summarizing each of these future directions in online customer experience.

Turns out RBKCustom.com has a loyal customer in comedian Seth Rogen. He’s got several pairs of custom Reebok’s and is a big fan of the text personalization feature. As hilariously described in a recent appearance on Conan O’ Brien he has a particular knack for getting creative with the offensive language filter. When Fluid built the site we spent a lot of time on realtime, true-to-life visualization of the sneaker personalization to ensure end-users see exactly what they are getting as they design their shoes. We also spent a lot of time brainstorming the dirty words list. Kudos to Mr. Rogen for sneaking a few by!

You can see the Conan bit here:

http://www.nbc.com/Late_Night_with_Conan_O%27Brien/video/episodes.shtml

Choose the August 7th episode and then jump to 24:50.
You can also read about it in a few places:

Extract:
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2008/07/seth_rogen_unlikely_spokesman.html

Full quote appears in context on page 2 here:
http://www.elle.com/featurefullstory/14098/seth-rogen-movies-gossip-articles-pineapple-express.html

10 reasons many ecommerce platforms fail when it comes to custom products. In random order:

1. As a practical matter it is impossible to represent all the permutations of a product in the product database. If there were 6 configuration options, each with 10 different colors, this would represent 10*10*10*10*10=1,000,000 different products. Now imagine you offer 10 different configurable products. Many ecommerce platforms cannot handle this large a catalog. Even if it can, this number of redundant products would make managing the catalog highly inefficient.

2. The configuration of the ordered product has to be stored in the order management system and associated with a specific order, which many systems are not able to do.

3. Many platforms are not able to charge a variable price based upon configuration options. For example, adding your name to a pair of RbkCustom shoes costs more.

4. Ecommerce platforms are not prepared for product components to go out of stock. For example, when you are manufacturing items custom you could run out of the red material for the side stripe. Ecommerce platforms expect inventory to be handled on a SKU level.

5. At least one custom image usually needs to stored with each configured product that is ordered. The ecom system needs to allow these images or URL’s pointing to them to be stored with each order.

6. The ecom system needs to be able to send the order to the manufacturing system. The manufacturing system is usually a different system than their standard order fulfillment system, which typically requires some custom configuration or development within the ecom system.

7. We typically need to be able to navigate from the ecom system back into the configurator, usually from the wishlist or the shopping cart. The ecom system needs to be able to differentiate between custom and in-line products and route these requests appropriately.

8. On a more general level, the ecom system has to be able to handle both custom and in-line products. The handling of the different types of products will differ throughout the system, including the things we have already mentioned (pricing, purchasing, navigation in and out of the cart, etc), as well as things like product detail pages, product representations on category pages, etc.

9. This isn’t technically part of the ecom system but custom products usually complicate customer service. There is typically a different return policy for custom products. Order status information for custom orders is typically in a different system than that of in-line product orders.

10. This is also outside the core ecom system but the shipping mechanism for custom products usually differs; at a minimum, the origin point will be different. Dealing with the shipment of heterogeneous orders can be complicated. Should these orders be consolidated? How much should the customer be charged for shipping? How much insight should the consumer have into the shipping complexities?

Based upon our work with leading brands like Timberland, Design Within Reach and Reebok on their custom product offerings we frequently field calls from potential customers looking to either start a custom program or to evolve their existing offering. In many cases these are customers looking to move from first generation (often hard-coded and rigid) technology to a system business users can update (without a PhD in computer science from Stanford).

There are a lot of challenges associated with selling a configured product. Many of these are outside the scope of what we normally do at Fluid. But the custom product business is challenging and specialized enough that we have developed a deep understanding of much of what it takes to get a custom program running, whether it is part of our traditional offering or not. In this post I’ll explore a few of the considerations many people fail to keep in mind as they embark upon a custom program. In a subsequent post I’ll discuss Fluid’s product and services offering and how it is designed to address many of these challenges.
A few of the frequent stumbling blocks we encounter at Fluid include.

• Getting the product built: This seems like an obvious one but you’d be surprised how often we spend time talking to customers only to learn they haven’t thought through this specialized manufacturing process. While most of these people have an existing manufacturing business few take into account the challenges of taking a factory (and it’s employees) designed to mass-produce items by the hundreds of thousands and produce items one at a time. Doing so efficiently and reliably should not be taken for granted.While this topic is outside the scope of both Fluid’s skillset and this post, it is frequently the point many companies’ dalliances with custom products end. It’s that little detail – actually getting the product customers order built and shipped to them in a timely manner – that trips them up. (NOTE: for those of you considering a custom program we have a handful of companies that specialize in this type of manufacturing that we can point you to)
• Accepting orders in your platform: Next, there is the processing of orders through the customer’s ecommerce system. In the same way that many factories are designed to produce standard products not custom ones, many ecommerce systems are designed to produce products that can be represented by standard SKUs (style-color-size). After all, this is what happens for about 99.5% of all ecommerce transactions.Accepting an order for a product with as many customizable attributes as on Reebok Custom (up to 30 on some products) that can come in more than 9,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different variations is simply not something the typical ecommerce system is designed to do. Some do it more gracefully than others. At Fluid we have successfully integrated with Demandware, GSI and GSI’s Aspherio as well as home grown systems and have investigated many, many others. We can help you understand what to look for when evaluating if your platform is a fit.
• Shopping cart: Allowing customers to gracefully move from product configuration to checkout (And back!Customers are rarely 100% decisive and may want to return to a design and tweak certain aspects of a design, especially when configuring 6 or more attributes) and see their product, as they configured it, in their cart is an important part of the conversion process. Does your shopping cart support custom products? And if there is a way you can wire it together and make it work, is there an easy way to re-enter the configurator?
• Integration into the site: Many manufacturers treat custom products as “special.” And they should, custom products typically engender positive customer perception, generate brand attachment and sell for a premium. But by treating them as special they are too often relegated to a separate part of the site or even a micro-site. This makes them difficult to find and the outcome is lower traffic, fewer sales and a disintegrated experience. Timberland is a brand that has done a nice job of integrating customizable products into the main shopping experience, increasing visits and sales.
• Reporting: Given all the challenges associated with accepting orders and getting your product built, is it any wonder people rarely think of how they’ll understand what people actually buy? And frankly, when we ask customers what they would look at if they were able to see reports, the answers are not resounding. Since every order is different there would be very few commonalities in configuration. But looking that most frequently ordered color on a per-attribute basis and a few other reports can be a very valuable tool. The value of reporting and measurement should never be overlooked as we try to build measureable, constantly improving ecommerce offerings.

If this whole thing sounds overwhelmingly complex, there is hope! It has been done many times before (it gets easier every time). While technology may not have progressed to the point just anyone can set up a factory and build-to-order, increasingly brands are experiencing success with their custom programs. This success can take the form of improved brand perception, higher customer engagement and, most importantly, increased revenue by offering custom products. Also, technology is catching up. In my next post I’ll go into more detail about how Fluid helps customers deliver award winning (SXSW, Webbys etc.) product configuration experiences.

In the mean time, please feel free to contact us with any questions about getting your custom program off the ground.