Author: Spectrum Team

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.

Maintaining an e-commerce site means constantly evaluating and implementing third-party software to maximize your users’ experience and site performance. More third-party integrations mean more potential complications, workarounds, and ultimately, disruptions to your e-commerce process. Conversely, when consumers have a smooth shopping experience, without experiencing weird frames or 3rd party URLs, it solidifies the brand in the consumer’s mind, building credibility. In fact, Forrester quantified that good UX can raise ecomm ROI by 200% and excellent UX can raise ROI by over 400%.  

Our Approach

We recognize the importance of a consistent user experience, so when introducing brands to product customization, we begin with an integrated approach, considering both design and user experience to create an innovative touch point that only your brand can offer. Spectrum was born on a fundamental foundation to be designed around a brand’s DNA, delivering a unique and consistent branded experience.  This flexibility in UX and design doesn’t mean it will be code-heavy, however. We place a premium on optimizing for asset sizes, SEO terms and load times.

Spectrum’s platform is designed around your brand’s DNA

The Spectrum platform minimizes the need for additional resources for initial integration. With over 10 years of experience and usability analytics tracked across millions of product configurations, we are the leading experts supporting a wide variety of UX services for our clients. Our UX team guides clients who are new to product customization, helping them decide what (and how many) features would be best to personalize. We support and supplement a brand’s internal design teams with UI best practices, usability feedback and recommendations. Your in-house design team won’t need any expertise to match look and feel, as it’s easily done through the Spectrum platform.

If you are considering offering product customization internationally, we have an easy process for localization. Spectrum’s platform provides clients the easy ability to provide a consistent brand experience across all languages and markets your company operates in.

UX continuity creates a consistent experience for your customer, ultimately reducing bounce rates by 50% and product detail page abandonment rates. Our UX team will work with you to provide the most seamless product customization experience for your users.