Customization is one of the big buzz words on the Internet. Web portals like Yahoo! provide customized feeds of news, sports scores and stock quotes. And online retailers like Amazon.com deliver customized product pitches.
But most of the customization has been limited to the content on the computer screen. Now, online beauty products retailer Reflect.com is taking things a step further, using the power of the Internet to customize the merchandise it sells.
By collecting physiological, demographic and other personal information from its shoppers, the company says it is able to create shampoos, lotions and lipsticks specially designed for each shopper.
“What we’re offering is customization that is available to every woman,” said Hannelore Schmidt, Reflect’s director of marketing.
Reflect.com first tries to get a picture of its customer by asking her a series of basic questions: What is her ethnic background? What stage of life is she in? Does she still live with her parents, or does she have kids of her own? Some questions are more quirky: Which bird best represents her personality? A peacock? A hawk? A swan? Or a dove?
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Once it has a general understanding of the shopper, Reflect.com in effect designs products for her by gathering physiological information and determining what she is looking for in beauty supplies. To create facial cleansers, moisturizers and body washes, for example, the site asks how much time she spends in the sun. Does she have sensitive skin? Pimples? Lines? To create shampoos and conditioners, it asks how long her hair is, and whether it is dry, damaged, permed or colored.
The shopper can even choose a fragrance for her products, as well as the packaging and labels. All the products are made by Reflect and carry its brand name, but they also bear the name of the customer who will use them.
Customization is actually a “really old idea,” noted International Data Corp. analyst Jim Williamson. “Way back … everything was customized,” he said. “But mass production is a whole lot cheaper and so that is how things are done today.”
While people with enough time and money can still purchase customized goods, like a tailor-made suit, the Internet has made it possible to provide such products to a much broader customer base, Schmidt said. That’s because the Internet makes it easy and inexpensive to collect the information needed to create product specifications on a mass scale.
Reflect, which is based in San Francisco but has a warehouse in Cincinnati, was launched in December 1999 after being incubated at consumer products giant Procter & Gamble. Along with Institutional Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures, P&G is a major investor in the company.