Author: Spectrum Team

Successful custom product programs minimize start-up costs and time so the program reaches profitability as quickly as possible. Standardization can help, particularly when applied to easily-replicated processes. However, an overly-standardized approach won’t allow for flexibility to adapt to each unique brand. Spectrum helps clients navigate with this balance, with the ultimate goal of efficiency, not inflexibility.

Here’s how we do it:

AREAS WE CUSTOMIZE FOR EACH BRAND

A brand’s ecommerce site is a critical touchpoint, so a seamless brand experience between the site and the product customizer optimizes trust and drives conversion. These are our areas of focus for Spectrum’s custom platform to emulate the look and feel of our clients’ brands:

Overall User Experience – Spectrum looks at each client’s custom program holistically, with a unique approach for every brand. This is the most comprehensive part of our process, where we focus on:

• Defining the look and feel of the customizer experience and how it can align with the existing site
• Authoring logic documents that define the program’s overall structure from product options, to data set up to 3D development
• Defining and developing the overall number of products/combos
• 3D asset creation and aligning to brand styling

EComm Platform integration – This step involves integrating the new custom program with a client’s existing website software stack, including add-to-cart pricing, order management, product option management and more. Since every brand has a unique combination of these systems, Spectrum has flexibility to accommodate them all. For more details and examples on our integration with ecommerce systems, check out our blog.

Factory Integration – Flexibility at the point of production is most critical, since this is where most pre-defined processes and standards exist on the brand-side. Without properly integrating the ecomm experience and delivering the exact product a consumer has designed to them, the custom product program is a failure – a configurator that generates no revenue. Spectrum Connect brings that flexibility to the supply chain, particularly in two key areas:

• Types of files delivered – everything from simple product specifications to print-ready files
• File delivery method

Spectrum’s platform can be tailored to develop a user experience that fits the brand’s exact look and feel.

AREAS WE STANDARDIZE FOR EACH BRAND

In simplest terms, the areas we customize revolve around our client’s brands and processes. By contrast, the areas we standardize focus on Spectrum’s processes to leverage the existing platform/tech and bring the custom experience to life in a timely and reliable manner. This is the foundation in developing the most efficient custom product programs:

Spectrum’s process – With over 100 successful integrations, the key components to our process include:

• An extremely experienced team with 10+ years creating custom product programs for Fortune 500 brands
• Robust feature sets that continually evolve in response to our clients’ needs
• A ready assessment phase, our initial collaboration with clients to plan and prepare their organizations for launching a scalable, revenue-driving customization platform.
• Beginning our initial work at the factory to define factory file requirements, and then working backwards from there to insure realistic expectations and proper integration
• Comprehensive and standardized integration documentation provided to help clients’ tech teams

Web to Print – Web to print technology translates the consumer’s exact product specifications into a factory-ready file with all necessary details. Over time our web to print capabilities have expanded to accommodate a wide-range of file types and operations including print/engraving/embroidery files, spec/BOM, packlists and more.

Spectrum Connect ensures delivery of everything the factory needs to manufacture the product, whether that’s a part list or print-ready files, as in this JBL example.

Established Feature Sets – The following features are standardized across all Spectrum clients. This allows the Spectrum team to maintain and update these feature sets centrally, pushing updates out without further resources needed from the brand’s team:

• Front end integration into existing ecomm site
• Pricing & availability of products to customize
• Add to cart functionality
• Social sharing options
• User-uploaded content moderation
• Image upload functionality

Although many of our processes are defined as “standardized,” we understand the need for flexibility to meet each brand’s unique needs. In some instances, standardized process can be customized for a particular brand. For example, for user content moderation, we give clients the full flexibility to define and customize a list of moderated words in accordance with their brand standards.

Custom product programs are a large investment, involving many departments and stakeholders on the brand side. Spectrum’s processes reduce risks for our clients, with scalable and efficient solutions allowing for custom product programs to launch earlier and less expensively.

At the point of personalization, where a user’s vision is transforming into reality, the digital canvas holds immense power. Unfortunately, this virtual stage can’t perfectly replicate the physicality of  brick-and-mortar displays. So the transaction relies solely on the trust that their customized masterpiece will truly translate into a physical treasure. This is where Spectrum’s industry-leading 3D assets step in, bridging the gap between imagination and possession with hyper-realism.

Spectrum meticulously crafts 3D models that mirror our clients’ products with absolute accuracy. Our investment in talent and cutting-edge technology fuels this mission, creating assets that set the industry standard. With each click and customization, users’ confidence grows, witnessing their vision come alive in real-time.This immersive interaction is the catalyst for conversion, turning hesitant browsers into proud creators.

This magic isn’t born solely from Spectrum’s 3D expertise, however. It’s a balance between our clients’ intimate product knowledge and our team’s 3D artistry. In this blog, we peel back the curtain, revealing the refined processes and checkpoints that transform products into 3D masterpieces.

PILLARS OF OUR PROCESS

Spectrum’s 3D expertise is guided by three unwavering principles – our north stars:

1. Efficiency and Scalability – we believe quality and quantity can co-exist, with intricate 3D models materializing at lightning speed. We leverage cutting-edge technology to streamline our workflow without compromising detail. The results – 2,500 product scans (and counting) 3D assets brought to life and a reusable fabric library of over 1,000 materials created using scanning and other industry methods
2. Quality – Our QA process is a rigorous series of steps, ensuring photorealism for each asset with the end goal of making flawless reflections of customized products.
3. Styling – Spectrum collaborates with your team to utilize and replicate the style of high-quality photography you provide and approve.

INSIDE OUR EXPERTISE

We’ve established the pillars that guide Spectrum’s development of hyper-realistic 3D assets. Now, let’s delve deeper into the process that transforms product data into visual masterpieces. Our mission is to bridge the gap between digital dreams and tangible products, and it starts with a dedication to unrelenting accuracy.

BUILDING our DATA sources

We begin with a deep dive into every aspect of your product, devouring as much information as possible, including:

• Brand-Supplied Mannequins: Approved and provided mannequins ensure perfect proportions and dimensions.
• Brand and Product Style Guides: From color palettes to textures, these guides inform every decision we make.
• Existing Product Photography: Existing high-quality images serve as invaluable references, allowing us to capture the intricacies of your product’s surfaces, lighting, and even the way it interacts with light.
• Internal Product Experts: When questions arise, we don’t hesitate to tap into the wisdom of your brand’s product experts. These on-the-ground heroes ensure every detail, from functional elements to decorative placements, translates flawlessly into the digital realm.

PROCESS VARIATIONS FOR DIVERSE PRODUCT CATEGORIES

While our core principles of efficiency, quality, and styling remain steadfast, the techniques of our 3D artistry vary depending on the canvas. Each product category, from fabrics to hard goods, presents unique challenges, and we pride ourselves on adapting our process to achieve unparalleled realism.

SOFT GOODS

For fabrics, digitally capturing the detailed essence of fabrics demands a unique approach. We use advanced scanning technology to translate intricate patterns and tactile nuances of polyester, cotton and other garment materials/textures into precise “fabric maps.” These maps become the blueprint, seamlessly tiling onto the 3D model and optimizing our customization efforts. Through this refined process of material capture, we’ve been able to cut the previous 4-12 hour process in half. Other details around our soft good process:

• Advanced post processing, such as tone mapping and color grading, provides balanced white and black levels to prevent color oversaturation
• High precision anti-aliasing techniques enhance detail and clarity
• Accurate lighting and shadowing helps reveal stitching and folds in fabrics
• Bleeding-edge draco compression technology allows us to render much higher-density models without sacrificing performance or load-time

DURABLE GOODS

Metals and plastics call for a different approach. Here, sample products become our key resources. We physically handle them, rotating them under various lighting conditions, observing how materials interact with light and shadow. This hands-on immersion gives our 3D team an invaluable understanding of the product, allowing them to translate its nuances into pixelated perfection. For accurate representation, we often combine this intimate knowledge with existing product photography and, when available, CAD files. This multifaceted approach ensures every curve and contour is captured with pinpoint precision.

ACHIEVING AND MAINTAINING COLOR CONSISTENCY

Color fidelity is paramount, and for durable goods, we prefer to use previously defined product lighting environments where possible. Replicating standardized lighting setups ensures custom 3D assets seamlessly mesh with existing stock photography, maintaining brand consistency across all visual platforms. Imagine your customer holding a physical product, admiring its color, and then seamlessly transitioning to your online store, where the 3D asset mirrors that same shade with astonishing accuracy. That’s the magic of our tailored color approach.

By customizing our process based on product categories, we ensure every 3D asset is not just visually stunning, but a faithful digital twin, ready to guide customers through their customization journey with unparalleled confidence.

BEST PRACTICES FOR TOP 3D ASSETS

1. The power of two – client knowledge + Spectrum expertise – collaboration is where the true magic happens. Your insights guide us, ensuring every detail, from subtle stitching to intricate patterns, is captured with unwavering accuracy. We become extensions of you, translating your product into a captivating digital twin.
2. Details are where trust takes root – Small details build trust with your brand fans. A misplaced button or an absent feature, can chip away at a user’s confidence. Spectrum meticulously obsesses over every nuance, ensuring your 3D asset mirrors your actual product with precision. This level of detail is the foundation of trust, convincing users their digital masterpiece will translate flawlessly into reality.
3. Realism that bridges between pixels and purchase – The best 3D assets blur the line between digital and physical. When users gaze at your 3D model, they shouldn’t just see pixels; they should see the finished product nestled in their hands. This realism instills confidence, eliminates hesitation, and transforms a hesitant browser into a converted sale.
4. Possibilities beyond the web – Spectrum’s 3D assets aren’t confined to the digital canvas. Their high-resolution quality makes them versatile tools, ready to be repurposed for marketing endeavors, AR/VR experiences, or even gracing the pages of your catalog. We build them light enough for a web environment, yet robust enough for diverse creative needs.

Studies have shown 3D visualization has a profound impact on consumer psychology and conversion. In fact, in one Shopify case study, shoppers were 44% more likely to add an item to their cart after interacting with it in 3D. And when users begin customizing their own 3D product, rotating and zooming in on their masterpiece, they build trust, drive conversion, and ultimately, bring your brand’s vision to life in every dimension.

Embroidery is a booming opportunity in product customization. The global market was over $2.5 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow to nearly $6 billion by 2028, reinforcing how much consumers love the creativity and sense of craftsmanship embroidered designs bring. Precise stitching and mutli-colored designs are perfect for customizing soft goods such as uniforms, caps, coats, blankets, shirts and more. Whether it’s monogramming, patches, or even corporate branding for team gifts/swag, embroidery has huge untapped potential.

Unfortunately, at a commercial level, embroidery can be challenging. The need for manual oversight by embroidery artists and operators throughout the process makes scalable solutions difficult. Additionally, automated digitization processes often incorrectly predict overall stitch counts, mis-estimating them by anywhere from 10-50%, leading to unsatisfied customers and missed revenue opportunities.

Recognizing an opportunity, Spectrum set out to create a scalable and integrated embroidery solution for our clients. The end result is an online personalization experience that taps into the unique look of embroidery on a fan’s favorite products, bringing them confidence and increasing the likelihood of purchase. Here’s how we did it:

ACCURACY IN DIGITIZATION

When embroidery projects are inaccurately digitized, pricing and production issues quickly surface. To solve this problem, Spectrum applied our customization experience to the overall embroidery process, beginning with a validation process for user’s artwork at the initial point of customization, with the following criteria:

• Auto-detect image complexity (i.e. photos vs logos)
• Moderation monitoring for copyrights and trademark IP through Spectrum Protect
• DPI/resolution checking
• Overall validation to confirm logo sizing and material/stitch count fit

Once artwork is confirmed to be accurate and validated, Spectrum works with the highest quality digitization partner in the business to create a digitized logo exactly to the customer’s expectations.

COMMON EMBROIDERY FILE TYPES

Spectrum works with the two main file types within the industry:

1. DST: Data Stitch Tajima – the first format created that allows an embroidery machine to know where to place stitches. Unfortunately, this file type does NOT provide any color information, so an operator must assign thread colors.
2. EMB: Embroidery Format – Spectrum’s file format of choice, a proprietary format created by Wilcom and used by most industry machines. It utilizes attributes of the DST, but also contains color information.

1. Our process begins with user-uploaded files that are graded and evaluated to be print-ready
2. Spectrum embroidery technology provides the ability to edit and change individual thread colors within specific graphic elements

BRINGING ADDITIONAL COLOR OPTIONS

At a manual level, embroidery offers limitless color options, as thread colors can be changed to create infinite designs. Commercially, however, file types have limited color options, thus minimizing the creativity of embroidery. Spectrum solves that challenge by adding the ability to colorize artwork and isolate individual art elements for separate colors, within an .EMB file. Within our platform, logos are automatically scanned with this level of colorization, eliminating the need for re-scanning. Isolating design elements within a logo means brands are no longer limited to 1-color logos on their embroidered goods, and can be more true to their overall brand identity.

Spectrum’s technology makes it easy to colorize artwork and isolate individual art elements as separate colors.

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Embroidery brings a unique element of personalization – a classic sense of craftsmanship combined with creative opportunities. Spectrum has integrated the commercial details and nuances within our platform, so our clients can take full advantage of this embellishment without needing to worry about the nuances.

Spectrum’s primary goal is to be the best white-label solution for our clients. A brand’s e-comm site (and user experience) is a critically important touch point, so we work to ensure user’s full confidence by providing a seamless site experience. Extensive testing and ongoing optimizations with our clients has resulted in best-in-class customization interfaces that ensure users never realize a third party is involved.

HOW WE DO IT

Within our Spectrum Connect capabilities, formal user-testing is a key component in our process, providing innumerable short and long-term advantages. Testing parameters vary from client to client, but generally our user testing includes:

• Remote unmoderated user-testing
• Annual testing for existing clients, more frequently for newer programs 
• Recruitment for a minimum of 20 participants, with the following criteria:
  • Age demographic that matches brand’s consumer profile
  • Split between mobile and desktop users
  • Have purchased specific product in last year
• Session times vary specific to the need (average is a 15-min session)

AREAS WE FOCUS ON

With new clients, our user experience team works collaboratively with their e-comm teams to set up the initial customization program. The end goal is to optimize the experience throughout each step in the user journey, with particular attention to:

• Overall quality and comfort of user navigation 
• How users interact with 3D models
• Users’ ability to quickly understand customizable parts of the product 
• Navigation preferences and expectations when users have finished their customized product (or “recipe”) 
• “Add to Bag” process
• Observations for areas of hesitation, confusion or generally difficult interactions
• Overall value proposition for the user in customizing a product

For existing clients, user experience testing is a standard part of our annual QBRs, where we evaluate the previous 12 months of data and develop optimization recommendations. Our experience has shown custom product programs work best with constant optimization based on data, so we provide these evaluations as part of Spectrum’s overall service offerings. Regular feedback loops evolve and optimize our clients’ custom product programs. And while many of our recommendations are specific to that brand’s needs, we do provide recommendations influenced by successful initiatives with other clients.

SOME SAMPLE UX FINDINGS

Once our user-testing is complete, Spectrum synthesizes the data and provides recommendations to improve our client’s customization programs. Over the years, here are some findings and subsequent recommendations we’ve made to clients to optimize their custom product programs:

• Reorder custom options shown based on popularity, as well as eliminating ones that under-perform and replace with new options.
• Customization trends and data can influence changes to default product options 
• Certain options can be “locked up” when data shows consistent patterns of usage (i.e. users selecting the same design on left and right headphones)
• Tips on improving the brand’s custom product landing pages 
• Improved engagement when providing pre-defined images to serve as consumer inspiration and starting points
• Better results when the product customizer is in its own page vs. within a product detail page
• Users prefer actual font previews displayed in the options menu
• Insights for future marketing promotions based on custom product data, such as:
  • Product customization trends for unpredicted holiday opportunities 
  • Custom product interactions by day of week, allowing opportunities to align with other marketing efforts 
  • Additional data points to gauge success of partnerships and cross-promotions

How people use the internet is constantly changing, so Spectrum invests time in constant improvement and optimization of our clients’ custom programs. Implementing regular user testing services and recommendations ensures our clients remain on trend and impactful.

Spectrum has completed over 100 integrations across a variety of platforms and ecommerce technologies. And whether they come from existing clients, or prospects we’re speaking with, we’ve seen a pattern of questions about technical integration we felt we can address.

Our technology integrates with our clients’ ecomm systems on two levels:

• Front-end UX integration
• Back-end factory integration

FRONT-END UX INTEGRATION

Our primary goal is to be the best white-label solution for our clients. A brand’s ecomm site and experience is an extremely valuable touch point, so our goal is to ensure users never feel they are anywhere other than the brand’s website. Spectrum’s technology blurs the line between the customization interface and the brand site (i.e no odd frames or random URLs) so users never realize a third party is involved. 

These are some of the areas we focus on to to ensure our front-end integration remains the best in class:

• User experiences that fully integrate with brand look/feel/tone 
• Low code integration – front-end integration time is on the order of hours, not days
• Brands are able to retain full reign over site content, design and navigation since Spectrum technology rides on top of existing ecomm technology – no need to alter existing cart processes. 
• All pricing/product availability comes directly from clients’ databases, so product details are always up-to-date
• For cart/client management, the CTA is within the Spectrum interface, but is quickly handed over to clients’ existing checkout process, for a seamless user experience
• Spectrum platform provides the ability to save abandoned “locked recipes” from users, providing additional marketing opportunities through Spectrum Intelligence, and drawing on the inspiration of the customized experience

FACTORY INTEGRATION

Our 100% success rate for factory integration is a direct result of our unique process – we start by collaboratively defining final customized product states and options with our clients. Spectrum’s technology is the bridge between software and reality, so we define what is realistically possible with our clients’ products, and then work backwards to manifest that with our software. 

Ultimately, a successful integration is Spectrum’s responsibility – ensuring our clients can produce the item that looks exactly like what their users are seeing on screen. 

To achieve our 100% factory integration rate, these are a few processes and best practices we adhere to:

• Like many industries, the last mile in product customization is the hardest challenge to overcome. So this is where we place our focus, and what we use as our “North star” to drive future recommendations.
• Spectrum maps users’ custom product recipes and delivers these to your factory floor with an endless choice of file delivery options.
• Working backwards also helps us define opportunities for efficiency. Consumers’ delivery expectations are measured in days, not weeks, so we have a vetted list of production facilities that can help augment client facilities if necessary. 
• With the experience of over 100 integrations, we’ve developed a series of tools to help with facility integration, particularly when it comes to data and file format manipulation. 
• For any other needs, Spectrum offers an open API model to easily integrate into core business systems.

Ten years of product customization experience has reinforced that custom is custom. Your brand, products, options and factories are all unique so its important that your custom product experience accurately reflects it. We’re happy to put our experience of over 100 integrations to work, determining the best custom solution for your brand.

A large hurdle in developing a custom product program is finding a production solution that fits within the brand’s existing infrastructure and supply chain. Adding custom products in a customer flow requires levels of integration that may challenge legacy e-comm platforms, overwhelm teams and jeopardize the initiative. Any benefits of a successful custom program can be obscured by the challenges of integrating interfaces and data flow to make a smooth custom experience. 

With Spectrum Connect, we begin our integration process with your factory and production facilities, and work backwards to craft a custom solution. Our platform-agnostic technology ensures maximum flexibility, mitigates integration challenges and ensures success for our clients.

SAMPLE INTEGRATION TEST

If you would like to quickly emulate the loading of customized products into your existing e-comm system, we offer a quick and easy driver as a test. The driver enables your integration teams to load a sample product, add to cart, and ability to deliver an order acknowledgement. If all elements of the test integration are successful, the driver displays a corresponding message and visual to acknowledge the successful test. This easy test enables brands to evaluate custom product viability in hours and days, vs weeks and months typically needed vs. other systems. Read more information about common integration points between Spectrum and your ecommerce and factory teams here.

INTEGRATION WITH LEADING ECOMMERCE PLATFORMS

Like many industries, the “last mile” in product customization is the hardest challenge to overcome, so this is where the Spectrum team places the bulk of our focus. We collaborate with our clients to define what is realistically possible with their products, and then work backwards to manifest that with the Spectrum platform. At the end of the day, we consider integration to be our responsibility, making sure our clients can produce the item that looks exactly like what their users are seeing on screen.

With our “last-mile” focus, we have achieved a 100% factory integration rate across a wide variety of existing platforms. Below are the ecomm solutions we integrate with most often and some of our clients on those platforms.

If you do not see your system on that list, or if your e-comm solution is custom-built, no worries. Spectrum’s tech agnostic approach can work with your existing platform. Feel free to reach out if you have any specific technical questions as you consider adding a custom program to your e-comm program.

Spectrum Customizer began helping clients with their custom product programs over 10 years ago. Since that time, we’ve been singularly focused on becoming the global leader in product personalization. Never content to simply be a “configurator,” we place our emphasis on first ensuring proper integration with our client’s facilities to ensure the custom products can be produced exactly to their customers’ expectations. This focus has resulted in a 100% factory integration rate with our clients, resulting in Spectrum’s broad client portfolio, with specialties in outdoor equipment, apparel, technology and accessories.

If you haven’t considered product customization within your product line, there may be a few surprising benefits that you hadn’t considered.

INNOVATION WITH DISTINCTION

Brands have no shortage of retail outlets anymore. Unfortunately, between supply chain challenges and competition from 3rd party retailers, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for brands to maintain the margins they’re used to. Thankfully, this is one of the largest benefits to product customization – the ability for your brand to innovate with distinction. Offering exclusive product personalization in your own distribution channels, reduces friction and/or competition with 3rd party retailers. Custom products, accurately portrayed with best-in-class visualization, such as through Spectrum 3DTrue, reinforce your brand’s innovative qualities and provide additional and unexpected buying opportunities.

As users navigate and build their own products, tools like Spectrum Creator provide your users with customization options – everything from photo integration, text and color options, stickers, and monograms. Every interaction is tech-forward with visually rich 3D assets, fast visualizations, intelligent moderation of user imagery, etc. Your biggest brand fans have the ability to completely customize their favorite products, making them uniquely their own, while providing your brand with retail innovation opportunities.

INCREASED ENGAGEMENT AND CONVERSION

No digital initiative can be considered without evaluating the potential ROI it can provide. With product personalization, your consumers are naturally inspired to engage deeper within your site. They can explore more options within your product line, perhaps even products they had never considered, providing even more reasons to stay longer on the site. In fact, Spectrum clients routinely see 5X increase in time on site.

As consumers immerse themselves and invest more personal time customizing products, price sensitivity drops. More personal investment of time and emotion means consumers are more likely to feel “compelled” to complete their transaction. Need proof? Spectrum clients’ custom SKUs are their best sellers, outselling stock SKUs by 3X on average.

And in the event your user spends time creating a masterpiece, but doesn’t purchase, there are opportunities for highly-personalized re-marketing. Customer data and details from custom orders, combined with existing eCommerce data, provide valuable insights into a brand’s most loyal customers, their preferences, purchase behavior, etc. When combined with a feature such as Spectrum Intelligence, these insights can inform very specific profiles of your custom audiences, offering highly-personalized marketing opportunities or even future product line insights.

INCREASED LOYALTY

Brand fans already come to your site, but product personalization gives them a reason to stay longer. Personalization turns your website into their studio and your products into their palette, where features like Spectrum Creator gives fans a chance to go even further, customizing with photo integrations, stickers, colors, stickers, fonts and even monograms. These customization options, cleanly integrated into a consistent UX experience keep your site sticky, reducing bounce rates by up to 50%.

Product customization can come with potential risk, as you open up your brand and IP to unknown ideas and modification, even to your most loyal fans. It’s a common concern, but one that can be well mitigated through moderation. Cutting edge AI-driven moderation, such as Spectrum Protect, allows for maximum protection of your brand, by scanning for profanity in text and visuals, saving your team’s time while protecting against copyright infringements, vulgarities and inappropriate content.

GETTING STARTED

We understand an enterprise-wide custom product program has a substantial impact across multiple departments. In our experience, the first step is to determine personalization opportunities within your product line, taking into consideration things such as the products’ popularity, new release schedules and products that might present the best creative “canvas.” For more detail on early decisions you’ll need to consider, you can refer to our Ready Assessment blog. And as you progress in your decision-making, Spectrum can provide ROI modeling to better help inform product decisions.

Usually the last, but most important, consideration is to evaluate your current supply chain. Begin by opening up discussions with your current factories to understand their full capabilities vs. what you are looking to implement. If your facilities are able to take on the customizations you’re looking for, Spectrum can easily integrate directly your new customization program with them. Or we can assist in finding 3rd party facilities to ease the last mile of production and fulfillment.

The advantages of product customization are untapped by many brands. With a turn-key process refined over dozens of successful integrations, Spectrum Customizer has the experience to successfully onboard your brand, offering unrealized revenue streams for you.

At Spectrum, we take great pride in offering functional as well as aesthetic customization as a key feature of our platform. This convergence of aesthetic and product feature customization is highly beneficial to the outdoor category, where self-expression with performance features are highly sought. We make full product customization a reality for our clients, including many in the outdoor industry, including Benchmade, Leatherman, Gerber, Hydro Flask and more, affording us a deep lens into industry trends, consumer desires and KPIs that drive each brand’s custom offering.

A key hallmark of outdoor enthusiasts is their joy in forging their own path. The independence they seek in the outdoors directly aligns nicely with the opportunity for them for product customization. In fact, outdoor enthusiasts customize products up to 40-60% of the time, higher than any other industry. Tapping into this sense of independence and passion should be done cautiously, however. As mentioned above, form cannot be at the expense of function. Customization options should be chosen carefully, with specific emphasis on options that won’t compromise the product’s integrity and performance. In our experience, these types of options vary widely from product to product, but can include:

• Alternative handle colors and laser engraving for knives
• Personalized text and custom artwork plus accessories for water bottles
• Custom image upload with built-in moderation for multi-tools

The customization experience must inspire your audience to invest their valuable time in personalizing products. A seamless branded experience with best-in-class 3D visualizations provides confidence in your users that the product they have designed will be exactly what they receive. How important is that seamless, branded experience? Done well, across multiple industries, our clients generally see nearly a 200% increase in conversion of custom SKU’s vs stock. As their final step, the consumer completes their purchase with confidence, feeling confident the factory will receive, produce and deliver the exact product they’ve ordered. 

For the user, factory contact is the last step. By contrast, this is the Spectrum team’s first area of focus. We work directly with our client’s in-house teams and facilities to develop a factory integration solution first. Prioritizing factory integration has resulted in our 100% client integration rate and in-turn, building our team’s unique experience. We are able to provide multiple levels of support for fast rapid production, serving 75+ countries with 65+ independently-sourced factory partners to help provide the best custom production solutions. Read more about our factory integration efforts here.

As the Spectrum Customizer has grown, we’ve learned some products, and categories, lend themselves to product customization more readily than others. In the highly-competitive technology category, it’s critical for brands to avoid becoming a commodity or building a “me too” image. For this category, offering product customization is a great way to differentiate the brand, while also creating unique points of contact and engagement with their top fans.

Generally speaking, technology consumers thrive on expressing themselves through the products they buy, leveling up their product experience with uniqueness when possible. One need only look at the custom subculture in gaming and music as examples of this underlying trend. Unfortunately, in a category where consumers demand innovation and have a passion for self-expression, few brands capitalize on those audience needs, falling into a potential parity trap.

For brands interested in providing product customization, it is critical to find the best customization opportunities with product lines. Spectrum helps our clients evaluate product popularity, velocity, release schedules, product styling and ease of embellishment to determine the best product customization opportunities. Within the technology sector, these types of options can take a variety of forms, such as:

• Personal photos wrapped around a Bluetooth speaker 
• Custom graphics for removable headphone tags
• Color and texture options for gaming controllers

As users spend time customizing their favorite products, the quality of the user experience must inspire their confidence. The best brands deliver a seamless UX brand experience, combined with high-quality product images, allowing potential buyers to thoroughly inspect their custom product at every angle and purchase confidently, resulting in far fewer dissatisfied customers. In fact, this type of product experience and inspection perfectly aligns with an audience that is inherently technology-focused.

However, on-screen customization without the ability to effectively deliver user-designed files to a factory is useless. Spectrum begins our process at this point, working backwards, ensuring 100% factory integration with our clients and production facilities. If your existing production facilities may not be able to easily handle custom production, Spectrum has over 45 factory partners across the world that can augment your facilities, providing multiple options to fulfill your tech audience’s wishes.

If you’re looking to take advantage of your strongest brand advocates, and give them ways to express themselves with your products, consider adding a product customization platform and separating yourself from your competition.

Since we first launched our product customizer, we’ve always provided a form of administrative tools to our clients. The first phase of our tool focused on text moderation and reporting. In the second phase, our focus turned to helping clients optimize their customer workflow, particularly around frequently-changing customization options. Now, as our global client base has grown and our customization platform has evolved, we’ve uncovered even more opportunities for functionality within our admin tool. After an extensive UX prototyping phase with considerable client testing and feedback, we are now launching the next evolution of our administrative tools, focused in the following areas:

1. User and order management

• Ability to provide varying levels of member access levels + user management
• Navigation elements configured per client based on the features of their customization program and product licensing
• Admins have the ability to impersonate other users on their team, allowing them to more easily answer questions and troubleshoot issues for others.
• Order management and search functionality of order data, including date, PO, export functionality for further customer support by CSR’s and at the factory level. Note – does not allow for changing the status of an order. 

2. Product management – manage components real-time to ensure consumers are only making selections that are available at the factory 

• Live/Not live toggle for components – allowing the ability to toggle off and on specific components so clients can be confident the platform is only showing products available to be ordered 
• Flexible thumbnail management allows client to use RGB HEX values (perfect for flat colors) or images (to better showcase more detailed materials, such as metallics)

3. Personalization management

• Manage personalization elements, including stock art, prints and patterns (add, categorize, re-order selection)
• Fonts management including availability and order of fonts for text-based personalization of products

4. Moderation

• Developed a guide for defining text moderation expectations within the admin tool including character replacement and deny list case sensitivity. Also added ways to update the deny list, including bulk import capability.
• Automated moderation of text and images is also available using industry-leading artificial intelligence (AI) services, which helps to protect brand image without requiring a team of moderators. 
• Improved functionality to allow clients to define specific images that should bypass image moderation. This was a frequent request among clients using our AI service, so we added the functionality. 
• For clients that have human review as part of their content moderation, we’ve added the ability for clients to moderate images or questionable content uploaded by users. 

5. Reporting

• Ability to refine your custom program based on real-time order data
• Create trends out of custom products are being ordered (which colors are most popular, what fonts are being used the most) 
• Provide daily order summaries – streamlines analysis of custom order information

Please reach out if you’d like to learn more about our admin tools or any aspects of the Spectrum 3D customization platform.