Written by: OJ Skjelten, CEO of Embodee
Most conversations I have with brands about customization start in roughly the same place, with a shortlist. There is usually a configurator option or two, perhaps some 3D pipeline tool or even a custom build proposed by the company which built their eComm site. The demos have been seen, the feature comparisons have been made, and the question on the table is which of these to buy.
It is a reasonable way to spend the time. I also think it is usually the wrong order of operations.
Start With the Apparel Customization Workflow, Not the Technology
The better starting point is the end-to-end workflow. How a product gets created, set up, published, configured by a customer, ordered, and then actually manufactured and delivered. You need to see that whole path before you can say anything useful about which components you need.
Don’t get me wrong, the whole is obviously made up of its individual parts and those parts have to be good. But if you choose them before you understand the path they sit in, you are guessing. The guess tends to surface about a year later, when somebody asks why the lead time has not moved.
Which is the thing I would point at first.
A Better 3D Configurator Doesn't Always Fix the Workflow
A brand buys a very good configurator. The customer experience genuinely improves, everyone is pleased with the decision, and then it turns out that getting products and example designs into the webshop still takes weeks of work.
The assortment stays thin. The launch calendar does not move. Nothing was wrong with the configurator, it did exactly what it said on the box, but the constraint had never been there in the first place.
It was upstream, in a part of the process nobody had thought to look at while comparing feature lists. And the same thing happens at the other end, where the webshop looks wonderful and the orders come in cleanly and every single one of them still has to be turned by hand into something a factory can manufacture.
That is not bad luck, it is just how workflows behave. Improving one component moves the bottleneck rather than removing it, and to remove it you have to know where it actually is.
Where Apparel Customization Workflows Break Down
So, the first reason to start with the workflow: in general, most of the friction is not in the parts at all. It is in the interfaces between them. This is especially true when a workflow has been stitched together over time from partially compatible solutions supplied by different vendors. These Frankenstein workflows are quite common, particularly in fast-growing companies where solutions were added in a hurry whenever a new need appeared.
Nobody sets out to build one of these. You end up with one, usually without noticing. The webshop needed a configurator, so one was added. Orders needed processing, so a system was chosen. The factory needed files in their format, so something was built for that. Each decision was sensible on the day it was made, taken by someone solving a real problem with the information they had at the time.
And it works. That is worth saying plainly, because it is why these arrangements survive as long as they do. They work at last year’s volume, they work while the people who understand the seams are still in their jobs, and they carry on working right up until the product line doubles or a new factory comes online or somebody takes another job. The good news, and there is some, is that the interfaces are usually where the largest gains are sitting untouched.
The Hidden Manual Work Behind Product Customization
The second thing is what happens in those interfaces. Where two parts do not quite meet, somebody fills the gap by hand.
That is where the real cost hides, and it is worth being precise about how it accumulates, because it never arrives as a decision. Someone rebuilds the file just this once, because the launch is on Thursday. Then it happens again the following week. Then it is simply how that step works, and within a year it is load-bearing and undocumented and two people know how it runs.
These fallbacks are close to invisible from the outside. They do not live in any system, so they do not show up in any evaluation either. When you compare configurators, nobody demos the spreadsheet, and nobody introduces you to the person who checks artwork on Friday afternoons. The work is spread thinly across salaries and lead times rather than sitting in a line item, so no one owns it and no one has ever put a number on it.
A workflow view finds them, because you are following the information rather than the software.
From Customer Order to Factory-Ready Production Files
So what does workflow-first thinking actually produce? The order-to-factory step is the example I would use, because it is where I see the largest gap between how things are and how they could be.
It is worth being specific about what the manual version involves, because from the outside it looks like almost nothing. Someone opens the order and checks that the design is complete and can actually be made. Someone recreates the artwork in the format this factory expects, at the right resolution, with the right color definitions, positioned correctly across the whole size range. Someone assembles the order data, the design data and the production instructions into whatever package that particular factory, and often that particular machine, requires. Then somebody else checks all of it, because the cost of getting it wrong is a production run with a name spelled incorrectly.
None of that is design work. All of it is translation.
In a properly designed workflow there are no manual steps between the customer order and the factory order, or very close to none. The same system that captures the order generates the files needed to manufacture it, correct for the factory that will make it. Done well it takes days out of delivery times and removes overhead that would otherwise scale with order volume, and it closes off a whole category of mistakes that were only ever possible because a person was in the middle.
Why Apparel Production Workflows Vary by Factory and Market
The third reason is that a feature comparison cannot see local reality at all.
I spent part of this year travelling with one of our customers, visiting their local business units and manufacturing partners across several geographies. Every location was convinced their situation was unique, and the annoying thing is that they were all right.
One factory ran modern digital printing and could take files in a current vector format with embedded color definitions. Another ran older equipment with its own quirks about print areas and how files had to be delivered. One market needed local language handling and local sizing conventions. Another had a partner who insisted, for entirely good reasons of their own quality process, on receiving production data in a format nobody else used.
Every one of those requirements was legitimate. Not one of them was visible in anybody’s demo. They only appear when you map how work actually flows from a design to a finished product in each place, and I will come back to this properly in a later article, because it deserves more room than I can give it here.
Map Your Customization Workflow Before Choosing Technology
If there is one thing I would suggest doing before looking at another product, it is this. Write down the workflow you have today, end to end, from creating a product through to delivering a customized order. Then mark every point where a person carries information from one system to another, or fixes something by hand so that the next step can happen.
Those marks are the project. Most teams have never drawn this, and most are surprised by how many marks there are and by where they cluster.
That does not mean replacing everything at once. Maybe you get there in one large step, maybe gradually over several releases, and the right answer depends on where the marks are and what they are costing you. But you can only sequence sensibly if you know where you are going.
For customized products, I do not think the winners will be the companies with the flashiest configurator or the most advanced individual component. They will be the ones that can move smoothly from design to customer experience to manufacturing and delivery, with as little friction in between as possible. That is a property of the workflow, and it is decided long before you choose the parts.