#lessonsinmasscustomization

We’re starting a new series of articles called “Lessons in Mass Customization” where we'll share some insights on mass customization.

For the first one in the series I thought I would talk about choice offering in customizers. Many people come to us with big ideas; they want to do custom shirts and offer 200 different fabrics and 100 button colors. We always advise against offering that many choices, and we often get the same reactions:

- But I have the possibility! Why not offer everything? Isn’t the whole point of mass customization to offer people the opportunity to design exactly what they want? 

Yes. But no. Having the possibility to offer 200 different fabrics doesn’t mean you should do it. And yes, mass customization is all about giving people exactly what they want, but the truth is, people don’t know what they want. They need to be guided through the design experience, and they need to pick from a pre-defined set of options.

We make hundreds of decisions everyday and customizing a product might quickly go from a pleasant experience to an overwhelming one if there are too many choices to make. Sheena Iyengar is a Professor at the Columbia Business School and author of The Art of Choosing. She brilliantly explains how to help consumers make choices using four basic strategies :

1. Cut – Less is more Only offer the most important options. We always tell our clients to resist the temptation of offering too many options. 

2. Concretize – Make it vivid A great product visualization is crucial. The more realistic the product is, the easier it is for the customer to make a decision. 

3. Categorize – More categories, fewer choices Customers can handle more choices if they are grouped into meaningful categories. It’s important to guide them within a directed user experience flow.

4. Condition – Learning how to choose  Move from easy choices to more complex ones. For example, choosing a shoe size is much easier than choosing colors. Once the customer has made 2 or 3 simple choices, he’s more willing to make a difficult one.

Another strategy that works very well is to offer many design starting points. This way, the customer can start from a predefined design or color scheme he likes, tweak 2 or 3 things and buy the product. This is much easier than starting from a blank product.

-But if I offer fewer choices, won’t the designs all look the same?

No. Let’s do some simple math to calculate how many different possibilities you could get out of a custom product using live examples.  

Take Luna sandals. They’re offering custom colors on their adventure sandals: 2 customizable zones, and 9 color options for each zone. There are 81 different combinations possible. Let’s say next season they decide to add 3 new colors to their offering for a total of 12. There are now 144 possibilities, and if they decide to add a 3rd customizable zone, like different 3 different soles, they would now have 432 different combinations possible!

Let’s look at more complex one. This sneaker from Undandy has 11 different customizable zones. For the 7 zones on the shoes you have 54 different leather choices, and then you can choose between 15 colors for your lace rings, laces and stitching. And then you can choose between 2 colors for the sole. How many possible combinations are there? 9 quadrillion. Yep, that’s 9 million billion. Does your brain hurt? Mine does.

So what’s the right amount of choices to offer? It will be different for everyone. We usually recommend to start with 10-15 choices, and see how people are using your configurator until you find your sweet spot. You can always change your colors or patterns every season or offer “limited time only” options. Listen to your customers and let them show you exactly what they want, that’s the whole point of mass customization!