The Internet – and consumers' growing interest in custom products – have put Personal Creations Inc. back into the wholesale business. Though supplying other retailers with personalized products it manufactures at its Chicago-area facility constitutes only about 5% of revenues versus 60% for its consumer web site and 35% for its catalog, wholesale is now the fastest-growing part of its operation, president of e-commerce and new business development Geoff Smith tells Internet Retailer.
Personal Creation has previously sold other retailers products that could be personalized for placement in their catalogs. It accepted order information from the catalogers, manufactured and personalized the items, and drop shipped them directly to the consumers. What made that business so problematic that Personal Creations dropped it in 1998 shows why the Internet makes it work now.
“Some of the catalogers were not capturing the personalization information correctly, so they’d pass us a bad order. There was a lot of human intervention, with a company taking orders, faxing them to us, and our people re-keying them in our system so we could manufacture the goods,” Smith says. “It was an inefficient business, so it was decided to get out of it and focus on the consumer direct business.”
The Internet changed all of that. “We realized we could get back into it using the web. We could communicate directly from company to company through the web, XML or some other electronic means,” Smith says. Now, Personal Creations offers an end to end personalized product service to other retailers on a free, hosted basis as a way to move its own products. Online shoppers are passed from a retailer’s site to the Personal Creations interface to enter custom product information and then back to the retailers’ site without realizing they’ve ever left the retail site.
The order is passed into Personal Creations’ system electronically, flows to its manufacturing system electronically, and the product is produced. Return rates due to personalization errors are less than one half of one percent. “We’ve eliminated room for human error and labor cost,” Smith says.
Smith says many of his wholesale customers are dealing in commodity items and looking for a way to distinguish themselves by providing something unique to their customers. “For some, it’s providing a whole new category of business,” says Smith.
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