Wilson Custom Glove Builder
A photorealistic product configurator that's still running fifteen years later.
The situation
Wilson Sporting Goods wanted customers to build their own glove online and see exactly what they were buying — every panel, every lace, every stitch color, rendered photorealistically and updating in real time.
The obvious approach was pre-rendering. With that many color and material permutations, the obvious approach was also impossible: the file sizes were enormous, the load times were unusable, and the combinatorics went past what anyone could reasonably produce.
Collaborating with Rogue Media, we rebuilt the configurator around SVG color slicing — separating the glove's photographic detail from its color information so that color could be swapped programmatically while the leather grain, shadows, and stitching stayed photoreal. Megabytes became kilobytes. Load times became instant.
What I Did.
Technical art direction
Defined how the photography had to be shot and separated for the slicing system to work — the constraint that made everything downstream possible.
The color-slicing system
Built the SVG architecture that decoupled color from photographic detail, cutting asset weight by orders of magnitude with no visible loss.
A production pipeline anyone could run
Documented the system so Wilson's team could add new glove models and colorways without rebuilding the engine each time. That's why it's still running.
The best compliment a system can get is that nobody's had a reason to replace it.
