Personalize Your Style With Customized Fashion

Personalisation is the key for luxury brands catering to the more discerning customer

- Richard Lord

For luxury heritage brands, customisation has become an essential offering. More than eight out of 10 labels falling into the category have introduced some kind of personalised, customised, tailored or bespoke service over the past year, according to a report by Shanghai-based research firm Fortune

Character Institute. Options range from fully bespoke, with pieces made exclusively for the individual, to personalisation services, such as monogramming, to customisation, with choices available from a set of pre-existing options.

The latter, which might offer a choice of colour, material, shape and size, is known as mass customisation, and it is not confined to the expensive end of the market. Nike, for instance, launched the Nike iD customisation service on its website in 1999. For luxury brands, however, personalised and bespoke services represent a return to their roots. Originally makers of unique products for a small clientele, the dramatic growth in the market over recent years has prompted many to look for new ways to connect with their customers.

Louis Vuitton, for instance, offers several personalisation options. These include hot stamping for selected leather goods and a trunk-painting service, the latter only available at the Marina Bay Sands Island Maison. Buyers of selected small leather goods can also avail themselves of the Mon Monogram service, introduced in 2008, which allows them to customise an item, either in-store or online, with a combination of their initials and vertical or diagonal stripes in a choice of 17 colours, making for more than 200 million possible options. The pieces are made from scratch in Paris, with delivery taking between four and eight weeks.