Photo gift service Personello has launched a simple but useful web service dubbed DAZZ that lets you preview a wide variety of goods with uploaded photos on them, completely automated and with both custom images and video clips.
It seems like a no-brainer for any personalized photo gift service provider to offer a similar functionality, but to the best of my knowledge DAZZ is currently the only one of its kind.
What you do is create an account on the DAZZ website and upload a photo that you’re considering printing on things like mugs, mousepads, t-shirts, teddybears, snowglobes, jigsaw puzzles etc. to give away as a gift. The startup’s ‘DAZZigners’ will then strip out the background and create a collection of so-called photostyles (e.g. Flowers, Heart, Sepia, Pop Art, etc.) centered around the main subject of the photo.
DAZZ subsequently lets you preview a bunch of items and also put together a video that shows a number of items in a sequence which should help make up your mind. For each type of item, you also get to see a separate animated video clip showing you the personalized gift in question in a relevant setting. (screenshots embedded below)
The biggest downside of DAZZ is that it takes several hours to get your photostyle previews ready, so it’s not the most ideal way to trigger impulsive purchases (although you are notified by e-mail once the previews are ready for your evaluation). Also, the video player inexplicably doesn’t offer a way to embed videos in your own website or blog so you can only play them when logged on to your account on DAZZ.com.
I think Personello, a startup based in Germany, was right to execute on this idea and offer a way for potential customers to visualize personalized photo gifts prior to purchase. Many people are not aware of the fact that photos can be printed on a slew of regular things, and this could open their eyes to the possibilities of giving away personalized gifts and significantly lower the threshold for them to actually start buying stuff.
