JD Sports - Product Customisation
Project Context
This project focused on improving the product customisation experience ahead of the World Cup 2026 trading period.
Customisation was identified as a strategic revenue and customer experience lever due to the expected surge in national football merchandise demand during tournament cycles.
The work wasn’t about adding customisation as a feature - it was about making customisation feel trustworthy, predictable, and commercially safe during one of the highest pressure trading periods of the year.
Project Team
The project team consisted of a Product Manager (PM), Business Analyst (BA), Technical Product Owner, and myself as the Product Designer from JD Sports. We collaborated closely with a third-party engineering team responsible for the development and technical implementation.
Working closely with the PM and BA, I engaged with stakeholders across the business to gather requirements, understand operational needs, and identify user pain points. These insights helped shape the product direction and informed the design decisions throughout the project.
The Core Problem
The biggest challenge in this journey wasn’t technical capability.
It was uncertainty.
Customers didn’t always know how their name or number would appear on the shirt, and this ambiguity created hesitation at the point of purchase.
From a business perspective, this translated into lost conversions, more customer service enquiries, and unnecessary post-order friction.
At the same time, operational constraints around returns policy and fulfilment processing needed to be communicated clearly without interrupting the shopping experience.
There was also a brand safety risk associated with user-generated text input, particularly across multiple languages.
Taken together, the problem was less about enabling customisation and more about designing a controlled environment where customers felt confident completing their purchase.
Discovery and Strategic Thinking
I started by looking at how customisation experiences were typically delivered across sports retail.
Most solutions in the market fell into two extremes:
Lightweight previews that didn’t feel connected to the real product
Technically ambitious rendering systems that were difficult to justify for commercial retail use
Neither approach was a good fit for JD Sports’ operational and delivery context.
The opportunity was to design something in the middle - visually credible enough to build trust, but simple enough to ship and scale.
To support this, I worked closely with merchandising, studio production, and distribution teams to understand manufacturing and fulfilment limitations before proposing any design direction.
This was important because the experience needed to solve customer problems without creating downstream operational complexity.
Preview Experience Design
The key design decision was to avoid building a complex real-time rendering system.
Instead, I proposed using realistic product imagery with placeholder preview text.
Three approaches were evaluated:
Generic product mockups
Real product imagery with dummy preview text
Live rendering integration
I recommended the second option.
It provided the best balance between customer confidence, engineering feasibility, and delivery speed.
A small but intentional detail was aligning typography curvature with professional football kit printing patterns. Industry review suggested that curved printing was the dominant convention across major merchandise suppliers, so the preview experience reflected real-world production behaviour.
The intent was not to simulate production perfectly, but to reduce the gap between what customers expected and what they would receive.
Constraint Communication
Customised products are not eligible for returns, so messaging had to be introduced carefully across the journey.
I designed inline signals for:
Size availability
Customisation eligibility
Policy limitations
The goal was to move constraint awareness earlier in the purchase flow rather than resolving it after checkout.
This reduced the likelihood of post-purchase disputes and customer service escalation.
Brand Safety and Input Governance
To protect commercial and brand integrity during high visibility trading periods, I worked cross-functionally to define a multilingual content filtering approach.
The system was designed to:
Detect prohibited terms during customer input
Provide immediate feedback when validation failed
Maintain a smooth configuration experience despite enforcement rules
The objective was to enforce safety boundaries without introducing unnecessary friction into the purchase journey.
Execution Approach
The project was delivered over three sprints:
One sprint focused on requirement definition and technical feasibility alignment
Two sprints were dedicated to design development and validation.
Stakeholders included Product, Engineering, Merchandising, Studio, and Distribution Centre teams.
A key success consideration was ensuring the solution could be operationalised without adding fulfilment overhead.
Commercial and Customer Impact
The design aimed to improve outcomes across three areas.
Purchase Confidence
More realistic preview behaviour and clearer journey messaging were intended to reduce uncertainty during configuration.
Service Cost Pressure
Improved policy and constraint communication helped reduce customer service enquiries.
Operational Safety
The profanity governance framework reduced exposure to brand and reputational risk during peak trading periods.
Internal modelling suggested that small improvements in conversion confidence during World Cup trading periods could translate into significant seasonal revenue impact.
Design Philosophy
This work was guided by a simple set of product principles.
I prioritised trust over visual complexity.
The experience was designed to be extensible beyond football merchandise into other personalised product categories.
Where possible, I favoured solutions that could be delivered within existing engineering and operational capability rather than introducing long-term infrastructure dependency.
Reflection
The most important outcome of this project was not the preview system itself.
It was demonstrating how product design can operate as a commercial and operational risk-management function inside high-volume retail commerce.
By focusing on expectation management, brand safety, and scalable journey logic, the customisation experience was positioned to support peak seasonal trading while maintaining customer trust.