On December 16th, I watched a segment on the Fox Business channel with Laura Kofoid, one of the co-founders of a new website called Laudi Vidni (“individual” spelled backwards) that allows consumers to design their own handbags, working with eight basic shapes and forty different colors of leathers/fabrics that can be combined for a seemingly endless array of original designs.
The entire process is done online, the manufacturing takes place in Chicago, the handbags range in price from an $85.00 wristlet to a $495.00 tote, the bags are shipped within three to four weeks of ordering and the company guarantees customer satisfaction — if you receive the bag and aren’t happy with the quality or design, you can send it back for a refund or a credit.
Below is the video clip of the segment that appeared on Fox Business:
I published a link under my “Other Shops & Sites” heading several months ago for the Laudi Vidni site, as I think it’s a great idea (especially now, when consumers are more demanding about value for the dollar spent) and an excellent way of allowing the consumer to be in charge of getting what she wants rather than wasting time browsing through piles of look-a-like bags on chain store shelves that are all the wrong color, wrong size, wrong style, wrong price, wrong everything.
But there’s more on the web than just designing your own handbags. I stumbled across this site just yesterday: Shoes of Prey, a company founded by former Google employees that takes the same idea behind Laudi Vidni and applies it to women’s shoes.
They start with six basic shoe types, but the customization options are near dizzying, with varying heel (flats to wedges to 4.5″ stilettos), toe and back designs, a wide variety of buckles, bows and straps for decoration, and numerous materials (leather, suede, fish skin, pony hair and snake skin) in a surprising number of colors and finishes. The prices start at about $175.00 (U.S.) and top out around $280.00 (U.S.), which is startlingly affordable for custom women’s shoes.
The site states that all shoes are hand made (though they don’t say in which country they’re hand made . . . Vietnam? Indonesia?), it takes six weeks to ship from the date of order, they ship worldwide and they, too, boast a customer satisfaction guarantee, even promising to remake/repair shoes for free so that they’ll fit just right if that’s what you’d prefer rather than getting your money back.
The two sites above are probably the most visible of the recent DIY wave on the net (which takes the ‘Just in Time‘ business strategy and completely democratizes it), but there are a lot more:
1.) Design your own lipstick and lip gloss: Lilie Customized Cosmetics — the prices are higher than your average drugstore line of cosmetics, but how cool is it that you can create your very own colors for your very own look!
2.) Design your own perfume (men & women): My Parfuem — I guess “My Perfume” was already taken? The bottle styles are fairly lame, and I have no idea as to the quality of the fragrance you’ll receive, but it’s an interesting exercise to sort through their available ingredient options and think about how you might design a fragrance that’s just exactly what you want.
3.) Design your own dress: Style Shake — contemporary styles, lots of fabric and color choices, great prices.
4.) Design your own jeans (men & women): IndiDenim — a very easy to use interface that gives you a good number of options for creating a pair of easily affordable jeans that fit the way you want them to.
5.) Design your own dress shirts (men): IndiTailored Custom Dress Shirts — hey guys, now that dress shirts are in in in (and they are are are), we’re all going to need a lot more of them. This site lets you fit them to your personal measurements without paying a fortune.
6.) Design your own Swiss watch: 121 Time — I mean, Your Taste + Swiss Technology = Envious Style, right? Who would argue with that?
These are some of the better ones I’ve run across that deal with fashion, fragrance and accessories, and they should get you launched, nicely and affordably, down the road to creating exactly the kind of wardrobe that *you* want . . . you know, once you get tired of pawing vainly through the racks of discounted, post-Christmas sale merchandise to find something you desperately like, want or need.
