Phunksun-al Technology

How Phunksun Wear could better use technology to market customization.

Written by Xinyue Liu, Xiaolu Lin, Yue Chen and Lilah Halbkat.

Phunkshun Wear has been manufacturing face masks in the rocky mountains since 2011. The brand’s facemasks blend fashionable graphics and technical fabrics in order to provide winter sports participants with a high performance product that compliments their individual style. Unique to their industry, they offer custom-face-mask services. Phunkshun Wear works directly with retailers, brands, and resorts to develop a mask graphic that speaks to their region and consumer. Photographs, trail maps, and fabric textures can be recreated on their products with lifelike appearance, with no minimum order quantity.

To make custom masks, consumers are required to fill a form on Phunkshun wear’s official website and upload their own pictures. However, consumers are unable to preview what their mask looks like.

Currently, sports brands in the market such as Nike and Adidas, incorporate online customization in order to attract more customers to buy their favorite customized shoes. For example, the Nike ID website allows customers to choose the type of shoes to be customized, the color of the various parts of the shoes, and the option to include an exclusive logo. After a series of design options are chosen, the customers will get a pair of unique shoes designed by themselves.

Most recently, NIKE is offering the most popular virtual and augmented reality technologies for their customization. In the Nike store in Paris, customers will be able to use this technology to create for shoes with different colors. SmartPixels, a French company that specializes in technology research and development in the field of augmented reality consumption, is responsible for the development of this platform.

Shown below, users need to first put a pair of solid white shoes into the NikeID device, and then use the store’s tablet PC to personalize the color of the upper, while the color effect will also be real-time projection hologram to white shoes through AR technology.

Punkshun Wear could update their current marketing technology by incorporating an online customization form similar to the Nike ID software. A main differentiating factor between Phunkshun Wear and other ski mask brands is the flexible customization options. However, with a website that requires the consumer to contact the company to design a mask, it is easy to lose potential customers in translation. With the oversaturation of the sports apparel market, price and comfort are no longer the only consideration for consumers. They are more and more concerned about the personality of the product. Online customization is a creative technology because it enables everyone to create a unique product that is entirely personal.

Taking it a step further to incorporate virtual reality into their online customization would add a huge convenience factor to Phunkshun Wear’s current customization program. Nowadays, with the rapid development of e-commerce, people have the desire to buy things without leaving home. However, e-commerce has encountered its own problems such as fit and unmet expectations. Because the customer can not try on the product, virtual reality allows customers to see themselves wearing the product through the upload of a photo or the creation of an avatar.

This technology could boost Phunkshun Wear to the forefront of customized snow-wear, and could create a myriad of new marketing content for the brand.