Make It Personal
Here at the dawn of Web 2.0, when user-generated ideas are all the rage, a rapidly growing number of companies is making it possible for you to customize goods online before they’re delivered to your doorstep.
It’s no coincidence that customer and customize are both rooted in a word meaning “one’s own.” Consuming is all about making a piece of merchandise yours, and the trend of personalizing products before the point of purchase is well under way. Call it the Make It Yours movement — or MIY, to coin a term.
Self-branding
The latest and greatest sites on the Web today are those that empower the user. MySpace, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — all of these modern giants have found success as vehicles of self-expression. Likewise, the current explosion of blogs, mashups and user reviews was sparked by the desire among users to make a personal mark on the Internet, if not on the world.
Armed with that MIY impulse and a credit card number, the modern consumer goes shopping.
“Personal branding is a means of presenting ourselves to the world,” says Mark McClusky, senior products editor at Wired magazine. “I think people seek a meaningful way — outside of the traditional fashion industry, outside of traditional design — to present their own brand the same way that Procter & Gamble worries about presenting Tide. Kids around college age right now, especially, are super-cognizant of managing their lives in this way.”
We’re not just talking about having initials stitched on a hand towel, either. At NIKEiD, a forerunner of personalized gear, you can customize elaborate color schemes for your sneakers and tag them with your own name. Print your pet’s face on a bookmark at Moo, or order private-stock labels for a home-brew at myownlabels.com. At Trek, you can configure a bicycle down to the drivetrain and saddle, then decide whether you want a paint job of flames, flowers or lightning. Need to impress a coed? Send a bag of M&M’s with a personalized message. You can even order all green ones.
Though driven by a youthful inclination, the availability of personalized products — sometimes called PPP for “people-powered products” — is by no means the exclusive domain of one age group. At Lego Factory, kids from 8 to 80 can design a Lego model (a car, a hotel, a ski mountain) and order the parts for it in a customized box. Dad can “build” his own BMW Mini Cooper without ever picking up a wrench; the site boasts more than 10 million possible configurations. Mom can compile a brag book of baby photos at Shutterfly. These days you can put your own face on a postage stamp or credit card, order return-address stickers with cartoon icons of the whole family, or emblazon a logo on a chocolate bar. In the most literal example of self-branding, you can order a branding iron — to use on your cattle or your T-bone, it’s up to you — bearing your own initials or a stylized coat of arms.
The user’s experience: front-end customizing
Two advances have been fundamental to the growth of the MIY movement: We’ve all become more conversant with technology, and better online design tools have simplified the customizing process even as the options multiply.
Derek Elley is chief strategy officer at Ponoko, a forward-looking company at the bleeding edge of user-defined design. Noting that Dell was one of the first companies to enable online consumers to build the products they wanted, Elley emphasizes the significance of front-end design tools on the user experience.
“Things change. They get easier with time,” he says. “Customizing products with Dell was difficult if you did not know how to use a computer or the Internet — now you do, it’s easy. Personalizing products with CafePress was difficult if you did not know how to use 2D design software — and now you do, it’s easy.”
Try clicking through any custom-solution site and the point is immediately made clear. To create business cards online, for example, we no longer blindly choose fonts and input contact info; on a good site, the card is built in real time as we edit and tweak it. We want to see exactly what the product will look like, with all the guesswork gone.
In this way, we consumers not only satisfy some need for self-expression, but we get to take back a little control, too. 8020 Publishing, a custom media outlet, advertises “blurring the lines between professional and amateur.” It feeds the notion that the little guy just might know better than the faceless corporation.
