FootJoy knows a winner when it sees it. In fact, its leading brand of golf shoes are worn by some of the top winners in the PGA, including Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els and Vijay Singh. So when the shoe company decided to offer a customization application on its Web site, it knew it needed a surefire winner there as well.

FootJoy felt that it had a vast untapped market of customers who wanted to build their own made-to-order shoes easily and inexpensively. But the company didn’t want the added expenses – in increased call center staff, longer factory lead times and higher merchandise returns -- that customization sometimes requires.

The footwear firm decided to hire MindsEye, a Web application development company in Boston, to build a trial application as a proof of concept. The idea was that users could logon to FootJoy’s site, click on the MyJoys application, and quickly build and order a customized pair of shoes, without the hassle of making a lengthy call to customer service or visiting a retail store.

The key criteria of the application was that it had to be extremely easy to use. MindsEye decided the best way to ensure customers could quickly get up to speed building and ordering their shoes was to use Macromedia’s Flash and Remote Flash technologies. The decision helped in many ways. First and foremost, Flash is interactive. Each change customers make to their custom shoes is reflected instantly on the screen – no new page load required. This means users make fewer ordering mistakes, and it ensures MyJoys experiences fewer order abandonments.

With Flash, individual option choices are easy. Rather than viewing items in typical HTML-based pull-down menus, customers can view all options on one screen. When they make a choice, the changes are automatically updated to the shoes.

The application works quickly and cuts down on order errors, since users can see their shoes exactly as they will be made in the factory – prior to placing an order.

The application also uses Flash on the back end, further decreasing the chance of order error, said MindsEye CEO Jim Burke. "We can package the order file, it’s actually an XML or Flash package, and send that directly to the factory in China via FootJoy’s AS/400 system," he said. "That way, the factory can just pull up the image and see exactly what the order should look like." This also avoids any language problems that may crop up between the U.S. customer base and Chinese manufacturers, he said.

FootJoy said the initial application has exceeded its sales targets by 254%. In fact, the application has been up and running for just three months, and it has already reached the company’s planned 12-month return on investment. FootJoy said the success has made it eager to expand the application to work with its dealers and suppliers.

"FootJoy is a very conservative company, and when they came to us, their main concerns were with the technology – will it work, how hard will it be, is Flash that widely implemented," Burke said. "MyJoys has been such a great success that those concerns have all disappeared. Now, their main concern is how to expand the technology to provide even more benefits."

For more information, visit FootJoy here, and try out the MyJoys application here.