STANDARDIZING CUSTOM

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.