Web Savvy: Custom Shopping--Have It Your Way
Harry McCracken tries out custom-blend cereal and design-'em-yourself
sneakers.
Harry McCracken
From the July 2001 issue of PC World magazine
Posted Monday, May 21, 2001
I have tasted the future of breakfast--and it's delicious. It has
oatmeal flakes and banana bits and cranberries, and yup, it's an appropriate
topic for a column called Web Savvy. I speak of the custom-blended cereal that
I ordered from Mycereal.com. And although it may only be the future of my breakfast, I hope that it's also a glimpse of where
e-commerce is going.
After all, if any shopping venue can deliver built-to-order products to
lots of people, it's the Net. You know what I'm talking about if you've ever
hopped online to buy a custom-configured PC. A bunch of sites are applying the
same concept to different stuff, including Customatix.com (athletic shoes and
boots), IC3D.com (jeans), Reflect.com (cosmetics), and Airborne.net (swanky
titanium bicycles).
Of course, nobody needs custom breakfast chow or high-tops. And prices
at these sites can be steep. But I could see myself becoming addicted to buying
items this way anyhow--it's the most entertaining Web shopping I've done in
eons.
Just Add Milk
Mycereal currently operates in semistealth mode: You can't get in just by showing up at
the site. (I stumbled on a banner ad that let me join a pool of test
consumers.) The site--a venture of breakfast behemoth General Mills--lets you
blend 80-plus ingredients, ranging from soy flakes to chocolate marshmallows.
The cost? A buck a bowl--a lot more than off-the-shelf cereal, but not out of
line (I keep telling myself) for a made-to-order meal.
The site doesn't let you mix ingredients willy-nilly: You can't
combine items that would make for soggy cereal--say, rice puffs and raisins.
And a wizard limits your choices further, based on your nutritional goals, sex,
and age.
As I said, my own custom cereal won me over based on taste alone.
Which is just as well--I have my doubts about using a Web site as a virtual
nutritionist. I told Mycereal I was a 36-year-old male; it kept offering me
health tips for postmenopausal women. Oops.
Contrast that experience with the mundane but effective customization
tools at Airborne's
bicycle site. You piece together the bike of your dreams by using drop-down
menus in a configurator that looks uncannily like those at Dell's and Gateway's
online computer stores. But instead of choosing hard drive capacity and monitor
size, you specify the type of handlebars, pedals, saddle, and the like.
If the Shoe Fits
Airborne's bikes start at $1500, so I opted for a thriftier form of
design-it-yourself transportation--a $65 pair of sneakers from Customatix.
Seemingly aimed at well-heeled (pun unavoidable) skateboarding kids, the site
lets you meld a dizzying array of styles, materials, colors, and graphics
for--the site boasts--more than 3,420,833,472,000,000,300,000 variations. Which
is a lot more than you get at footwear colossus Nike's similar but considerably
more spartan custom shoe
site.
Using Customatix's slick browser applet, I pointed, clicked, and
designed a pair of flashy lime-green running shoes with black-and-silver trim,
red soles, and appliqu駸 of a satanic little guy on the sides. They
arrived on schedule ten days later, feel fine, and look sharp, even though
Customatix's "lime green" is a tad more lemony in real life than it had
appeared on my monitor. And there's no question that these sneaks are uniquely
mine. Matter of fact, the first passerby I encountered after I put them on
stopped in his tracks, did a double take, and blurted out,『Hey, lookit the
shoes!』I'll take that as a compliment.
Contact PC World Executive Editor Harry McCracken at websavvy@pcworld.com.
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