Mass customization is the process of producing goods efficiently in large quantities, but tailored to fit an individuals needs. With this process, Nike and Puma have allowed consumers to design their own shoes that fit individual personalities and styles at reasonable prices while improving performance. These two competitors are taking shoe designing to the next level by letting consumers have an online experience that allows them to feel like a designer while having a fun experience and inventing one of a kind shoes.After visiting the two websites, NikeID and Puma Mongolian Shoe BBQ, the two approaches that the companies took in offering customized athletic shoes had similarities and differences that make consumer have two unique experiences.
NikeID’s website was easy to navigate while having a simple design layout and good use of color. The site is designed around how individuals can create there own merchandise such as shoes, apparel, and equipment to reflect individual styles and performance.
When entering the site, the available merchandise is organized into men and women categories with all the available styles and accessories clearly labeled. The use of color that Nike uses in their website allows customers to easily read the merchandise available and creates an aesthetic appeal that is enjoyable to the viewer as the pictures on the website pop out against a black background. This allows finding specific item very easy.
NikeID is styled so that viewers can see the existing merchandise with the price and name descriptions labeled when scrolling over picture as well as having the option of starting your own design. When designing customized shoes, Nike has made this process as easy as possible. All you have to do is choose the style of the shoe you would like and choose the colors available for select parts of the shoe. The shoe that you are designing is displayed on the left side of the website and changes instantaneously as new colors are selected for the customized design.
Even though NikeID makes the design process of building a customized shoe unique and easy, there are still problems that the company could improve. A problem that I feel that Nike could improve upon is there limited amount of colors to choose from. When on the site I had difficulty selecting which colors to choose because there was a limited amount of color options and they did not have any patterns to choose from. On the other hand, the company had a wide variety of shoe styles to select and design making the overall process more enjoyable.
As for the Puma Mongolian Shoe BBQ website it has a very different approach from NikeID. The unique design set-up is themed around an Indian restaurant. This distinct layout makes it fun for the user to explore as each tab is designed to have items in it to reflect items that are found in a restaurant.The site is designed just for customizing your own shoes and not for buying already existing merchandise. The unique feature that Puma has over Nike is that if you do not want to have the experience of designing your shoe online you are able to locate a store in which you can design your perfect shoe.
When entering the site it is easy to get started on customizing shoes as a box immediately pops up asking viewers if they want to start designing a customized shoe. After clicking the start up box, it takes you to a restaurant menu which displays the two types of shoe styles that consumers can create and gives consumers step-by-step instructions on how to create a customized shoe.
When starting the customization of Puma shoes, the company set up the site as if you were picking what you wanted to eat at an Indian restaurant. The placemat on the table had the pieces of the shoe that customers can design and the bowls on the table contained materials and colors to select for the parts of the shoe.
Developing the shoe is more of a tedious task as customers use chopsticks as a tool for selecting the colored material in the bowl desired instead of using a regular hand or arrow to make a selection. After selecting a piece of the shoe to design, customers use tongs to choose the material in the restaurant bowl. This process of the designing the shoe was very hard as the tongs move over the bowls to quickly and does not stop directly over the material customers would like to select.
By visiting the two sites of NikeID and Puma Mongolian Shoe BBQ and having a first hand experience at customizing my own individual shoes, I found that the NikeID website created an overall better experience for the customer. Although I found problems with both of the sites, there were less problems that I encountered with Nike than with Puma. Nike made the design process easy and very clear. They displayed the customized shoe design while choosing the colors and customers did not have to pick the materials.
With Puma Mongolian Shoe BBQ, I experienced many problems with the website. First, the Puma site only has two shoe styles to select, unlike Nike where they had a wide variety of shoe styles. Second, it was difficult for me to choose the colored material in the bowls as the chopsticks rolled of the material too fast and I would scroll past the desired color. Finally, I had difficulty clicking on the material I wanted to select and was not able to see the shoe I was designing right away, but only after clicking a box to preview the customized design.
Overall, by visiting the two websites I was able to learn more about how each company markets to their consumers as well as seeing the different approaches the two companies take in shoe designing. Both companies offer unique content that allows customers to be creative, but some design feature limit the creativity of consumers due do to a limited selection of colors, materials, and styles to choose from. Although the two websites were completely different from one another, they both got consumers involved by allowing them to create items to fit their individual personalities and spark consumer’s interest in buying one of a kind items.
