Artifi Makes Personalization Profitable

For more than 20 years, Wristband Resources has provided the identification wristbands worn by patrons at concerts, festivals, water parks, school trips, nightclubs, museums, and hundreds of other venues. The New Berlin, Wis.–based company’s commitment to quick turnarounds and helpful and efficient customer service has translated into longevity.

Product customization is key to its offerings, as customers look to customize wristbands, but the product customization configurator it had developed in-house was proving too costly to maintain. Product upgrades would have required significant development time and resources.

Like any company competing in the online sector, Wristband Resources is always on the lookout for new ways to increase e-commerce sales. Ben Winchell, the digital marketing manager at Artemax, Wristband’s parent company, felt the company needed to implement new customization options for consumers, allowing them to design their products in real time. The Flash technology its website was running couldn’t handle the updates. Frustration with the technology’s inability to produce a compelling visual element was compounded by the fact that it wasn’t integrating well with Wristband’s Kentico e-commerce platform. The company was missing a serious opportunity to take advantage of the potential for back-end automation, among other issues.

“Our existing customization solution was costly to maintain and was using dated technology, so we wanted a more scalable solution that would grow with us,” Winchell says. He chose to partner with Artifi Labs, an e-commerce software developer based in Wauwatosa, Wis. Wristband initiated the collaboration because of Artifi’s record of providing top-notch product personalization tools that lead to proven increases in sales. “Artifi was the company we aligned best with in terms of our product customization needs,” Winchell says.

Installing Artifi’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform immediately provided customers with a cornucopia of new features while shopping online. Customers could now design wristbands directly from their tablets or mobile phones and had access to a wider array of images, colors, and text options than ever before. But what really allowed people to interact with Wristband Resources’ products was the technology’s social component: People could upload clip art, compare their designs to other customers’ choices, and even share their designs on social media.

The ability for customers to visualize their purchases before they check out was a huge factor in turning clicks into cash. What had once been a challenging point of sale suddenly became an enjoyable experience. Customers began spending nearly 20 percent more time on Wristband’s site, playing with the wide array of features; their shopping carts grew by 21 percent and the conversion rate grew by 22 percent. The software not only drove traffic to the site, it increased sales across multiple performance metrics. The most impressive increase was a 37 percent jump in customized product sales, a direct correlation to the updated system.

The system has also allowed Wristband Resources to increase its product offerings by 30 percent.

Technologies will continue to develop, and Wristband needs its e-commerce platform to be as reliable as its products. “We’ve already made additional tweaks to support one of our newer products that led to significant growth,” Winchell states. He thinks the collaboration with Artifi should continue to benefit his company into the future. “Working with the Artifi development team has been great,” he says. “They’re responsive, knowledgeable, understanding, and committed to providing great software.”

The Payoff

Using Artifi's SaaS production customization software, Wristband Resources saw the following results:

• its customized product sales increased by 37 percent;
• its product offering expanded by 30 percent;
• its conversion rates increased by 22 percent;
• the time customers spent on the website increased by 18 percent; and
• its customized average shopping cart size increased by 21 percent.