Have It Your Way

By Lisa Takeuchi Cullen

Candy Short is a born shopper. She studies every purchase with the zeal of her hound dogs sniffing out a trail. So she couldn't help herself when, while laid up with a back injury in her Southern California home last month, she chanced upon a curious offer on the Internet. A company called Reflect.com promised it could customize cosmetics for her based on information she entered on its website. Short, 33, formulated a lipstick, a moisturizer, then pretty much an entire product line. Some $500 later, she kissed mass-market makeup goodbye for good.

As a mother of two on workers' compensation, Short isn't given to excess. She would have spent about as much for mass-market makeup at a department store. "Now more than ever," she says, "it made me feel good getting something made just for me."

The custom craze is on. Once a privilege exclusive to the Park Avenue class, customization has come to hoi polloi courtesy of the Internet. A few clicks beget jeans, sneakers, shampoo, cars, candy, furniture, even vampire fangs made just for you and delivered to your door, for not a whole lot more than the mass-market equivalent. Just in time too. In the age of TiVo and iPod, consumers increasingly expect to custom-tailor their lives, and retailers are eager to comply. New manufacturing technologies and the Internet make custom service possible, and the prices, while in most cases modestly higher, are still affordable. As Dell Computer has been proving for years, tooling products individually cuts inventory expense, pleases customers and even lures new traffic.

The trend is driven by the tech-savvy young looking for something unique--and by their parents looking for something that fits. In apparel--the industry charging fastest into customization--the nation's 76 million baby boomers, with their expanding girth and shrinking patience, are fueling the trend. Bill Bass, head of e-commerce for Lands' End, knew there was pent-up demand for better-fitting casual clothing. Two years ago, in a promotional campaign, his company put a high-tech body scanner on a truck and traveled around the country to offer personalized fittings. "People loved it, but they had to stand in line and take their clothes off, and it was a hassle," says Bass.

Therein lay the problem--and the opportunity. For apparel retailers, customizing used to mean high cost and low efficiency; for consumers, the indignity of strangers' circling tape measures around ample waistlines in public storefronts. Levi's has long offered customized jeans, but the Original Spin line is not available on the Internet, and the company says it has never grown to more than a small fraction of sales. At Burberry's flagship store in New York City, custom-made trench coats start at $700 and require an hour of fitting; just 20 sell a week.

Could a virtual tailor change those dynamics? Using new software from Archetype Solutions, Lands' End launched a custom-fit service on its website last fall. Customers measure themselves, detail their style preferences and answer questions about their figure. The data yield a precise pattern that gets beamed to factories in Mexico or the Caribbean, and a pair of customized jeans arrives on the customer's doorstep three weeks later. Bass says he expected the custom-fit line would grow to 10% of sales. But a year later, nearly half of all Lands' End pants sold online are custom.

One of the company's happy customers is Alex von Bidder, 52. He has a wardrobe packed with $2,500 suits in which he hobnobs with guests at the Four Seasons, his famed New York City restaurant. "I'm used to the finest things in life," Von Bidder says. "Best wine, best food. Still, I never thought I'd get custom-made jeans." His $54 pair from Lands' End is "the best-fitting thing I've ever owned," swears Von Bidder, who has since ordered custom-fit chinos and shirts.

Custom mass-consumer products typically cost 10% to 20% more than off-the-rack items. Jupiter Research found in a recent study that more than half of consumers were willing to pay $10 extra to custom-order a pair of $50 slacks--but not much more. "The economy's bad," says Madison Riley of retail consultants Kurt Salmon Associates. "But if it's not going to stop people spending, they'll make for darn sure what they do spend is on the best quality and fit."

Take Jane Miller, 57, a retiree in Knoxville, Tenn. "I don't like to drive, and I'm not a big shopper," she says. "Most of the time you don't know what you're getting. You make an investment, and it's a crapshoot." She tailors her purchases through Reflect.com and Lands' End and, with her MP3 player and DVD-rental club, customizes her tunes and movies online too.

Car buyers have always added features, a major profit driver for automakers and customizing shops that garners an estimated $26 billion-plus in sales each year. Gary Cowger, president of GM North America, says the trend toward personalization is evident in sales of the Hummer H2, a favorite of affluent baby boomers. Sales of accessories like running boards, brush guards and roof racks are "much better than we expected," he says.

Recession-squeezed automakers salivate at the thought of persuading even more buyers to customize by offering easy, accessible options online. In a study published this month, Forrester Research analyst Baba Sheddy found that 66% of prospective buyers customized vehicles while researching price online. In a bid to turn speculative customizers into real ones, Toyota's Scion, Honda's Element and Saturn's Ion will let customers order personalized cars on their websites with touches like aluminum pedals and gearshifts, and springs that adjust the car's height. Because young buyers "want something that says, 'I'm unique,'" says Toyota's Jim Farley, the youth-targeted Scion will offer 40 accessories.

But customization extends to gearhead items like air intakes, enhanced exhaust systems and rear spoilers. As Jill Lajdziak, a Saturn executive, notes, "Many young buyers would rather buy an affordable vehicle and then have a couple of thousand dollars to invest in a higher level of performance."

One thing's for sure with young buyers: custom sells. This fall American Eagle Outfitters, a clothing company, instructed its college-age buyers how to tear up T shirts and embroider jeans--and sold 12% more jeans in the process. Nike iD lets customers help design their own sneakers.

But there's a limit to how far retailers will go to let customers fiddle with their products. Jonah Peretti, 28, who works for a new-media arts group in New York, tried to order a pair of Nike iD shoes embroidered with the word sweatshop. That's a swipe at Nike's reputation as a company reliant on cheap foreign labor. Nike's response: Just forget it. --With reporting by Joseph R. Szczesny/Detroit

With reporting by Joseph R. Szczesny/Detroit