Month: August 2024

Estimated to account for more than $1 billion in annual revenue, the team uniform market is back to pre-COVID levels. Unfortunately, the traditional ways of selecting and ordering team uniforms online haven’t changed, forcing team managers and vendors to navigate complex combinations of custom and standardized options. Size varieties, custom names and numbers, fonts, and even position-specific equipment are all variables to consider when uniforming a full team.

To develop a more unique solution, Spectrum developed a platform based on our experience managing roster-based configurations for our team sports clients. Fully implemented, Spectrum’s roster management capabilities reduce the possibility of human error and make life much easier on team’s managers and players.

HOW IT WORKS

The biggest logistical challenge of assembling team uniforms is defining the parameters for what uniform options need to be standardized and which ones need to be customized. For maximum flexibility, Spectrum allows team managers to define their own uniform template across multiple variables, including:

1. Overall designs and styles including considerations for:
   • Colorways for home and away uniforms
   • Garment pairing rules (e.g. basketball jersey and shorts)
   • Additional garment variations (half sleeve, extra lengths)
2. Order logistics including:
   • Pricing and product size options
   • Quantity selection
   • Shipping locations
3. Define decoration placement based on selections
   • Name placement based on player number and size selected
4. Text and numbers management, including:
   • Font options – stock and/or brand specific 
   • Solid/pattern filled numbers and text
   • Shaped text (e.g., arch, bridge) or outlines
   • Color, alignment, scale and rotation
   • Embroidery visualization
5. Logos and mascots
   • Allow for user uploads or utilize stock libraries
   • Background removal
   • Artwork mirroring (e.g., football jersey shoulder art)
   • Alignment, scale and rotation

Throughout the process, and once the uniform is finalized, the Spectrum platform displays the uniform in photo-realistic 3D that allows for: 

• Zoom and 360-degree spin
• Multiple images and angles per uniform
• Visualization of multiple fabrics including embroidery
• Accurate visual representation of final uniform appearance

When a team order is complete, the last step is for Spectrum to deliver print-ready order specs to the selected factory. Final order specs can be delivered with custom images (via HTML, PDF or Json formats), and if necessary, delivered to multiple factories (requires Advanced Factory Integration license). Regardless of the final production source, Spectrum’s focus on factory integration ensures final products will be exactly as ordered.

TEAM ROSTERS FOR ORDERING AND MANAGEMENT

Team roster building, equipment ordering and ongoing management involve a number of details and logistics – adding/removing players, changing uniform sizes, etc) that the Spectrum platform is built to easily handle. By offering an intuitive and adept team roster experience you can encourage year after year use, repeat purchases and an increased customer retention rate.

Roster management includes:

• Addition of important uniform specifics for each player, including number, name, size & quantity
• Ability to order blank uniforms and team gear based on size
• Logic for enforcing minimum order quantity
• Visualization of custom uniform

Offering team uniform options can be a great way to build bulk and ongoing sales, year after year. Helping your clients manage the logistics of uniform ordering becomes much easier with Spectrum’s platform. We provide a streamlined experience for a team, simplifying the ordering process of navigating custom and standardized form fields, size varieties, custom names numbers, fonts, and more, keeping your customers happy and loyal.

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.