Peter McCollough for The Wall Street Journal
 

TazShirota, a trainer at Crunch gym in San Francisco, had 200 bobblehead dolls of himself made to give as gifts to clients. 'I don't know, maybe I'm just cocky,' he says.

 

To adorn the office of his new Brooklyn apartment, Saif Ahmed chose a truly one-of-a-kind piece of art. He bought a kit from online retailer DNA11.com to swab some of his cheek cells, and then mailed the sample to the company. The result: a futuristic blue and black digital portrait of his genome sequence encased in a Plexiglass frame. 

 

From yoga mats and high-end earphones to bobblehead dolls and candy, today's technology lets shoppers personalize a wide array of items with their own images, text and graphics. WSJ's Wendy Bounds digs into the new trend of of "Me-Tailing."

 

Conceding the purchase might seem a trifle "conceited," 31-year-old Mr. Ahmed, a former medical researcher who now works as a quantitative manager in capital markets, says he likes having something that really "represents a portion of my life artistically."

 

Customized T-shirts and mugs? So passé. Consumers rounding off holiday shopping are turning to "me-tailing," hyper-personalized everything from artwork and earphones to yoga mats and food. At mymms.com, candy-lovers can buy M&Ms embossed with half-inch visages of their kids or pets. In Chicago, Whoopass Enterprises LLC sculpts custom bobblehead dolls modeled from customers' own snapshots. And GelaSkins Inc. of Toronto will trick out iPods and more than 130 other gadgets with user-designed protective vinyl skins.

 

Thank technology for fanning our vanity. It's easier than ever to take a high-quality digital picture and send it anywhere, fast. Retailers, for their part, say advanced on-demand printing technology now allows them to quickly transfer pictures, text and graphics onto a variety of materials, including 3-D objects big and tiny, with clear results.

 

GelaSkins

Personalized gadget skin

Gadget Skins

Dress any of 130 gadgets in protective vinyl skins designed with personal photos and artwork. gelaskins.com | $14.95 to $29.95

 

Social-networking also has helped break down inhibitions about sharing our private lives. "We are so used to customizing the world around us … to being able on Facebook to customize our wall and to create who we are, and technology has powered that," says Amy Maniatis, vice president of marketing at CafePress.com, where visitors can plaster their pictures on a Gaiam yoga mat, Sigg water bottle or even TomTom GPS navigator. Some 40,000 new designs are uploaded by shoppers daily. MsManiatis says sales of the company's "make your own" products are expected to double this year to the "tens of millions of dollars" from 2009. 

 

One recent buyer is Christina Wells, a senior at the University of California, Berkeley who swapped her plain pink yoga mat for a custom blue one with a prominently displayed photo of her boyfriend, Nick, giving her the thumbs up sign. "He was mocking me for coming to yoga, so now I bring him with me," 21-year-old Ms. Wells says. "It's definitely a conversation starter."

 

Customization isn't just about aesthetics. For instance, Nike Inc.'s NKE -0.18% "NikeiD" program lets users choose materials for shoes' tread (say, for trail or street) and upper (Gore-Tex, mesh, etc.) as well as pick color of swoosh and stitching, and even imprint text on the heels. Different-sized left and right feet? That, too, can be retooled.

 

JH Audio LLC in Orlando makes music earphones costing $399 to $1,149 based on molds of customers' ears to provide optimized fit and better and safer sound. Buyers first visit an audiologist or local hearing-aid center to have silicone ear canal impression molds made.

 

The molds are sent to JH Audio, which uses a laser scanner and ultraviolet curing process to print designs on the tiny buds. Some people request a kid for each ear; others prefer their dog, says art director ZacPenrod.
 

Selling products designed by end users sometime raises thorny legal and taste questions. Most companies require customers sign disclaimers attesting they own rights to uploaded images. But monitoring orders for inappropriate content is more subjective.

 

"Someone in a bikini is OK," says Jim Cass, vice president and general manager of the Mars Inc. division that customizes M&M's. "Nudity is a no-no." Rules exist for political missives, too. Candidates can place orders with their names on candies, and a donkey or elephant image would make the cut. But the company won't print messages on M&M's that hint of endorsement such as "John James for Congress," Mr. Cass says. 

 

Harder to police are messages in sometimes unfamiliar lingo used in texting. Says Mr. Cass: "There are instant-message type things, and we'll walk around to people in the company saying, 'What does that mean?' "

 

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Christina Wells's boyfriend teased her about her devotion to yoga, so she had his face imprinted onto her yoga mat.

 

Similar challenges now face Fathead LLC, known for its enormous cut-out vinyl wall graphics of sports figures, as it segues into custom printing. Of the 100,000 images customers uploaded over the past year for super-sizing—about 750 alone during this year's Cyber Monday sales—most are innocuous like those from Lee Woods. The 56-year-old orthopedic surgeon in Whittier, Calif., says he purchased Fatheads of his children and vacation spots, and is giving his four siblings Fatheads of themselves and their kids or other family members for the holidays.

 

"They probably don't have room for them," laughs Mr. Woods. "But I'm enamored of the technology."

 

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Fathead

Customers over the past year have uploaded about 100,000 images to fathead.com for super-sizing into cut-out vinyl wall graphics.

 

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Saif Ahmed went to dna11.com to buy a custom-made portrait of his genome sequence to hang in his Brooklyn apartment.

 

Occasionally, however, there arrives the submission hinting of prank. "We've gotten requests to print people that were clearly drunk, passed out around the toilet," says Todd Lunsford, Fathead's president. "We may chuckle, but we won't produce it."

 

For many buyers, customizing remains a mostly me-centric activity. TazShirota in San Francisco, a personal trainer for Crunch gyms spent $2,000 to create 200 bobbleheads of himself holding a basketball and flashing a peace sign. He doled the dolls out as gifts to clients and friends and started an online photo-sharing page featuring recipients posing with "Taz Jr."

 

Says 31-year-old Mr. Shirota: "I don't know, maybe I'm just cocky. But it's been an amazing marketing tool."
 

Retailers say they take great pains to protect customers' privacy. At dna11.com, customers' unique genome sequences are isolated and then illuminated for photographing. DNA samples are destroyed after every job, says co-founder Adrian Salamunovic, and third-party labs don't see customers' names. Users don't seem too concerned: business has been so robust—between $3 million and $5 million this year—that the company just launched a "DNA Ancestry Portrait." Those pieces include a two-dimensional bar code that owners scan with a smartphone to read about their maternal ancestral origins online.

 

Indeed, there seem to be few limits on what personal information people will display. When 29-year-old Cameron Olsen ordered a GelaSkin to jazz up his BlackBerry Bold, he went for the ultimate personal touch: a skin brandishing his autograph across the smartphone's back, complete with a giant "C" and "O."

 

"All of our gadgets look more or less the same now, and you can go to any store and pick up a generic case for something," says Mr. Olsen, a mattress-company account specialist in Mississauga, Canada. "In this day and age, I find everybody needs to be a little different."