Fluid Configurator Solution Sets New Standard for Online Product Customization; Timberland, Reebok, Other Major Online Retailers Use Configurator Technology for Simple, Rapid Mass Customization; Timberland More Than Doubles Customer Conversion

Business Wire, Jan 24, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO -- Fluid, Inc., creators of innovative online retail solutions that drive conversion and brand loyalty, today took the wraps off the company's Configurator solution, a revolutionary product personalization and customization technology that branded manufacturers can use to dramatically improve customers' online shopping experience and convert more shoppers to buyers.

Currently in use by Timberland, Design Within Reach, Airtreks and Reebok, the technology improves the customer experience and conversion rate for personalized products. Fluid's Configurator has already proven its ability to increase overall web site conversion rates by as much as 100 percent while more than doubling conversion rates for customized products compared to previous-generation, server-side configurator technologies.

"People really want to buy products that express their individuality, and customization has become one of our key growth drivers," said Troy Brown, senior director of e-commerce at Timberland. "When we launched the Fluid Configurator, our conversion rate more than doubled from what we experienced with our original configurator. I attribute that increase to Fluid's technology, which delivers a true experience, not just a transaction."

According to Brown, many customers know what they like when they see it, but are unable to describe what they want when presented with a completely blank slate. The Fluid Configurator overcomes this problem by enabling Timberland to present its customers with literally dozens of pre-configured styles they can look at for inspiration to begin their own personalization process.

"Manufacturing is rapidly gaining the capability to cost effectively deliver truly individualized products, but until now online retailers have had great difficulty in taking full advantage of these capabilities and translating them into increased sales," said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies. "The advances in configurator technology Fluid has demonstrated have the potential to fundamentally change the process of bringing products to market, providing a compelling way for retailers to present their customizable offerings online, and for customers to personalize them to their liking."

The Fluid Configurator technology represents a quantum leap in the custom product configuration experience compared with server-side imaging technology in use on most sites today. Rather than requesting a new image from the server every time a shopper changes a product option, the Fluid solution programmatically colors the product from a single master on the client's computer -- in less than 2 milliseconds. Eliminating the need to request an updated image from the server dramatically improves the shopping experience by allowing shoppers to rotate the custom configured product 360 degrees and zoom in to any area to see greater detail without additional download time. This extremely high level of interactivity and responsiveness encourages experimentation and engages shoppers, resulting in a more compelling brand experience and significantly higher conversion rates.

Client-side rendering also reduces bandwidth requirements since it requires a single master image download, rather than constant image updates every time a shopper changes an option. Because most of the processing occurs on the client system, the Fluid Configurator offers virtually unlimited scalability.

The Fluid Configurator offers several other enhancements to the shopping experience. A variety of pre-configured product styles serves to inspire customers in their designs and help eliminate the "blank slate" syndrome. And, while other configurators stay isolated in one part of a web site, the technology intersperses custom configured products among other established products throughout a web site. This enables retailers to test new designs, display a much wider range of product choices, and draw more shoppers into the customization experience. The Configurator also allows shoppers to save designs, send designs to friends via email and SMS, and submit designs to the manufacturer for possible inclusion on the site.

"The Fluid Configurator establishes a new gold standard in the industry, and represents a fundamental change from the way things have been done in the past, setting new benchmarks for responsiveness, scalability and ease of administration," said Andrew Sirotnik, chief customer experience officer for Fluid, Inc. "We are the first to use client-side image rendering in this way and because we've built the technology with re-use in mind, we now have a proven, reliable framework we can offer to other online retailers to help them get to market more quickly."

The underlying technology foundation for the Configurator allows for day-to-day administration and integration with an existing site. Designers can easily add and update color choices and availability through simple, web-based administration tools. Tools are also provided to deploy these changes to production web servers. The Configurator is completely XML-driven, thus supporting virtually any product category. The use of Web services and SOAP standards makes integration with third-party providers of shopping carts, check-out systems, e-commerce systems, inventory systems or ERP systems straightforward.