A few custom retailers to consider:
Chromatic Gallerie: Round-toe pumps available in 45 colors, three heel heights and three fits for $88. Materials include leather, suede, faux fur and patent. All blue heels are $5 off in March. www.chromaticgallerie.com.
eShakti.com: Custom sizing and styling for dresses, blouses, jackets in sizes 0 - 36W priced from $40 - $129. Items are delivered within two weeks. Customization costs $7.50. www.eShakti.com.
Shoes of Prey: Custom shoes and boots in a range of styles. They boast a 70 percent perfect fit rate on first-time orders and will take returns for a $100 re-stocking fee. Prices run between $219 - $379 (though some are lower). Shoes take about five weeks to make and two to four days for delivery. www.shoesofprey.com.
For decades, women have complained about the challenges of finding clothing that fits. They grin and bear it as shoes pinch their toes, pants gap in the front or back, and jeans — well, let’s not even go there.
Chris Luhur was looking for a better way to serve customers. Using data from her online shoe boutique, she studied the reasons people were unhappy with their purchases. Ninety-percent of people who returned shoes complained about aspects of shoe fit or style that she wasn’t able to change. So in Fall 2011, she founded Chromatic Gallerie, an online shoe store that allows customers to dictate shoe size, width, heel height, color and material for $88 per pair.
“When you buy shoes in the store, you have one type of measurement which is length, but in actuality your feet are three dimensional,” Luhur says. She chose mass customization because — short of creating an actual mold of the foot — it was a way to provide better fit at an affordable price within a reasonable amount of time.
Luhur says her timing couldn’t have been better. The food industry was already featured customization (think Chipotle or Starbucks). Music customization had arrived in the form of Pandora and Spotify. Clothing has taken more time because it just isn’t as easy, Luhur says.
In recent years, Indidenim and MyShape.com — companies that offered custom made denim — ceased operations, as have several other custom companies you’ve probably never heard of.
Customized clothing — a step below tailor-made and a distant cousin to couture — can be more expensive and more time consuming than buying off-the-rack. And while the Internet (where most custom retailers are based) helps keep costs down and reduces delivery times by cutting out the middleman, building a successful business means uniting a range of different operations in one place.
“[Mass customization] is extremely hard to execute since it requires several areas of know-how to come together — fashion design, web development, user interface, pattern making, single unit production systems and precision logistics — in order to keep the whole thing from becoming too costly, too slow or too difficult for the customer,” says BG Krishnan, CEO of eShakti.com
Five years ago, eShakti.com began offering custom sizing and style options for dresses, tops, skirts and jackets. Some trial and error led them to a proprietary method of creating single customized garments in less than two weeks with most items priced under $100.
Customers can choose standard sized garments and customize the style or they can enter a series of measurements to also create a custom fit.
Nearly 50 percent of women who wear size 0 to 12 come to the site for custom sizing (10 percent) or custom styling (36 percent), says Krishnan. In addition, women size 12 and up come to find clothing that fits better but is still stylish.
Despite the apparent benefits of mass customized clothing and the affordable cost, its still a growing industry, one that many consumers have yet to discover.
“Most women don’t even know that such a possibility exists,” Krishnan says, “It seems too far out.”
