Offer Custom and Personalized Sports Merchandise this FIFA World Cup

With FIFA fever just soaring on, everyone across the world is supporting their favourite team and gearing themselves up with the team apparels.So if you are a decorated apparel printer or personalized apparel provider, what better way could it be to make most out of the worldcup fever, than allowing your buyers to try out their hands on their sports gear design with multiple design options and easy to use features.
Customers these days, more likely prefer to reflect their personality in their apparels and are also keen towards having perfect fit for themselves. This is now gradually leading them towards customized, or made to order clothing. Following the trend, major apparel brands have already gained the early mover advantages and are building their online business models to include offering personalized clothing for individuals and teams.

“It’s definitely a hot trend,” says Neil Saunders, an analyst with the research firm GlobalData Retail. “What they want to move to is mass customization, where you have the same sorts of efficiencies of mass production but you allow people to personalize things.” He also added that it was obviously a difficult balance and that for now customization remains ‘fairly niche’.

Dave Dombrow, the chief designer of Under Armour said, “We see customization and personalization as the new expectation from consumers, really. It’s a very important topic to us.” Under Armour, Nike and Adidas all have their own online platforms offering customization to their customers and allowing buyers to choose from various colors, patterns and even materials to give their shoes an individualized look. For Nike, it’s NIKEiD; for Adidas, it’s miadidas.

Looking to the trend, Adidas these days is also offering customized FIFA World Cup 2018 jerseys to its buyers.

Sports and Athletic Apparel

It would not be considered wrong if we say that the global apparel and footwear industry are now finally in their good days. That does not mean that their sales or demands were off. But on the contrary, it rose to a total of 3.16 trillion in 2016 which is a rise by 3.8%

Now even though it seems to be growing, this is also the lowest level of growth for the apparel industry since 2008. The only thing that has saved this industry from going even lower is the athletic apparel industry. The growth of sales in the athletic and sportswear apparel area have been more than double of what the apparel industry was able to achieve as a whole.

Sports-inspired Apparels

Now, another area in the apparel industry which is growing and you can offer customization on,is the Athleisure – the leisure in Athletics. These days, due to increased health awareness, almost everyone takes atleast one fitness and sports activity in daily routine, in order to stay fit and healthy. This is what led to a huge demand for fitness and sports apparel among all age groups, thereby, fostering the market growth.

Euromonitor International, a strategic market research provider,earlier provided data regarding the role that sports and fitness clothing plays in the apparel and footwear industry. Their analyst explained that although performance sportswear, with a market size valued at US$78 billion in 2016,shared the maximum market size among the other sectors of the industry, the sports-inspiredclothing is the category that is driving the growth of the industry. Both sports-inspired apparel and footwear industry is growing at a rapid pace and is registering a respective share of 10% and 6% growth in 2016. Also, along withthe emerging markets for the industry such as India and Thailand, core marketarea such as the US, despite its reputation as a performance-orientated market,is also highlighting appropriategrowth in the sports-inspired sector.

Athleisure is a trend that is gaining a lot of popularity these days majorly because of its ability to fill a particular gap in the market between an athletic wear and leisure apparel, when sportswear used to be merely functional rather than a style. These new garments now a days are performance enhancing, and hence today, with the Athleisure group, the end user is opting for more comfort, stylish and sporty options. This gives you more opportunity as a printer to offer choice of various materials and designs to your customers, in order to make them own your product offerings and customize it to reflect their personality.

Customization to offer

You can offer various customization to your customers with a very simple user interface so that your buyers don’t need to possess great graphics skills to create a personalized design.For example, the design interface provided by our online design tool is very easy and simple – user can simply select the t-shirt style with correct size and preferred color, then design the product following a pre-decorated template or start from scratch, using maximum number of customization options. Once done, user can preview it online, download a proof as well as share their design with friends and family for the comments. When they are ready to order, they can just add it to card and process the payment. On top of that, our design tool component is plug and play and can be integrated easily with your existing website. Some of the features that you can offer for personalization are:

Select Material and Color of your Choice

Sports apparel tend to have several parts in different color combinations to give it a aporty look. With our design tool solution, you can configure every product with multiple layers, and each layer can be set in different material and color options to create a unique made to order product.

Name & Number

Team sports gear ususally follow the same apparel design, while personalized for each individual player of the team with his/her name and jursey number. With our design tool, any user can create a personalized design and then place the order for the whole team by submitting name/number for each team player using a simple form based interface. This helps in avoiding duplicating the design for each player individually.

Check 3D Preview or Design in 3D

Opt for allowing users to create their design in 2D interface, however preview the final creation in 3D with 360 degree rotation. Alternatively, you can also opt for a 3D design tool interface for an actual feel of the end product.

That is how we do it!

We have created an awesome custom cycling jersey design solution with a 3D design interface for Ascend Sportswear where one can design their unique and vibrant custom cycling jersey through a multistep design process. Each step is to make sure the user completely satisfied with your custom design. One can get truly creative with these custom biking jerseys and sports gear to make a statement and stand out in the crowd!

Our another solution for the sports industry was for GL SPORT®. Every player has a reason why they play the game and how about showcasing the same in shin guard made only for you? GL SPORT®, a brand owned by a company Gualerzi®, founded in 1966, specialises particularly in the use and processing of carbon fibre, from which most of their products are made. We helped them offer their standard and made-to-measure shin guards which can now be fully customised using our advanced technology web-to-print solution. How cool would this be while gifting it to a sports freak?

Offer personalized products and give your business a new high

As lines between fashion and sportswear continue to blur, heading towards a trend that defines both fashion and performance as something not to be missed for in the apparel world.

So if you are an sports apparel and merchandise provider/manufacturer, make the most out of world cup fever with FIFA World Cup going on and ICC Cricket World Cup coming soon by setting up your online store and letting your customer personalized their apparel, shoes and sport merchandise like caps, mugs, flags, banners etc.

To know more about our web-to-print and design tool solutions or the possibilities of having one developed exclusively for you, please connect with our sales team at [email protected].

Leave a Comment

Scroll to Top