The success of stores such as Williams-Sonoma, with its cooking demonstrations, and Build-a-Bear Workshop—each of which engage customers in an activity or experience—underscores a truth in retailing that is just as important in the online world as it is in the brick-and-mortar world: The more fun, satisfying and easier you make it for people to do business with you, the richer your fortunes will be. One company that understands this concept and is applying it on its website is Timberland.

In August 2004, the Stratham, N.H.-based boot-maker launched a product configurator on its website that let consumers customize one of its basic boots. The idea came from Timberland’s supply chain organization, which, the previous year, had successfully developed the ability to mass-customize boots in its manufacturing facilities. The configurator was developed in HTML and moved consumers through the process of customizing their boot with pull-down menus. "We sold a lot of custom boots that way because people loved the product," says Brown. "But it wasn’t an experience. It was like filling out an order form."

Instead, Brown wanted the configurator to give customers the sense that they were holding the boot and color swatches in their hands. So Timberland hired Fluid, a Web design company, to help create a more interactive and more satisfying-to-use version of the configurator. The new configurator is an example of a Flash-based rich Internet application.

Now, when consumers click on the "Custom Boots" tab on Timberland.com’s homepage, they download the configurator application onto their computer (it takes about 10 seconds). Because the application resides on the user’s computer, it’s much faster than traditional Web applications, which require communication with a back-end Web server. In the HTML version, whenever a consumer clicked on a color swatch, the webpage would go blank while it refreshed with the new image of the boot. Now, a person can drag her mouse over a color swatch and the image of the boot changes instantly. Consumers can also click and drag their mouse across the image of the boot to change its orientation, as if they were turning the boot in their own hands.

"The configurator on our site today is far beyond anything we’ve had on our site [before]. It’s an experience. You go in and play. You have fun. It’s interactive and intuitive," says Brown. Consumers like it so much that as many as 1,000 of them every day click the "Tell a Friend" feature on Timberland.com to bring the configurator to others’ attention.