Custom Products That Appeal to Both Introverts and Extroverts

Dec 11, 2025 by Iris POD Dropshipping Tips

Personality As A Hidden Lever In Print-On-Demand

When I review struggling print-on-demand and dropshipping catalogs, I rarely see a lack of creativity. What I see instead is a lack of alignment between the products and the personalities of the buyers. Designs are clever, quality is fine, but the items feel like they were created for “everyone” and therefore deeply resonate with almost no one.

Psychology and marketing research have been quietly telling us for years that personality is a powerful determinant of buying behavior. The American Psychological Association defines personality as stable patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that differ between individuals. In commercial settings, this is not an abstract concept. It shapes how people browse, how they evaluate risk, how much detail they want, and how they feel about your brand.

Corporate environments have taken this seriously for a long time. Adobe’s design-focused research notes that the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, based on Carl Jung’s work and formalized by Isabel Briggs Myers and Katharine Briggs, is used by a very large share of Fortune 500 companies to improve collaboration and leverage diverse strengths. Personality is also mainstream in consumer insight: models like the Big Five (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) sit at the core of modern consumer personality research.

Crucially, personality does not just affect team dynamics; it affects response to marketing. A study summarized in Greenbook described how tailoring ads to viewers’ extraversion level, compared with generic creative, produced roughly double the conversion rate. Personality-based sales and marketing articles repeatedly show that analytical, driver, amiable, and expressive buyer types respond very differently to the same pitch.

For a print-on-demand or dropshipping business, especially one without inventory risk, this is an underused opportunity. You can treat personality not just as a targeting problem but as a product strategy problem. Instead of generic “funny mug for dog lovers,” you can deliberately create and position items that a quiet, introspective dog owner will happily use at home and that an energetic, social dog owner will proudly show off in a group.

Among all personality dimensions, extraversion–introversion is one of the most visible in everyday commerce. That makes it a practical starting point for your custom product strategy.

Who Your Introverted And Extroverted Customers Actually Are

Different frameworks define extraversion and introversion in compatible ways. In the Myers–Briggs model, extraversion describes people whose attention and energy are directed toward the outer world of people and activity, while introversion describes those who orient more toward their inner world of thoughts and reflections. Big Five research echoes this: extraversion captures sociability, assertiveness, and high energy; the opposite end reflects a preference for solitude and quieter engagement.

Sales and UX research flesh this out in more concrete behaviors. Writers on personality-driven sales note that extroverted or expressive buyers tend to talk more, think out loud, and respond readily to big-picture narratives and enthusiastic energy. Introverted or analytical buyers often prefer to listen first, ask precise questions, and take time to process before deciding.

Personality-based marketing guidance from Persana highlights channel differences: introvert-leaning customers often prefer direct email and written content that allows for reflection, while more extroverted customers engage more with dynamic, interactive formats such as video content and social media. UX psychology work shows that extroverted users gravitate toward socially rich, stimulating digital environments, while other traits, like high emotional sensitivity, are associated with preferences for lower information density, muted colors, and step-by-step flows.

Experimental work in virtual retail environments goes even further. A study described in PubMed Central used a virtual hypermarket and consumer-grade VR hardware to track navigation, posture, object interaction, and eye movements. With machine learning models, researchers were able to recognize Big Five traits from these behavioral signals. Extraversion, in particular, was linked with distinctive posture and interaction patterns inside the virtual store, while open-mindedness aligned strongly with eye-gaze exploration.

Together, these streams of research reinforce something you have probably seen informally in your own store analytics and customer messages. Some customers arrive, skim visuals, and buy quickly when they see something that feels bold and social. Others save products to wishlists, revisit size charts and FAQs, and only convert once they trust the details and feel personally aligned.

In practice, customers are rarely “pure” introverts or extroverts. Personality science consistently reminds us that traits exist on continua, and everyone is a mix of many traits, not a single label. That is why personality frameworks are best used as lenses rather than boxes. For a print-on-demand merchant, the task is not to classify each customer perfectly; it is to make sure your catalog and storefront give both ends of the spectrum something that feels made for them.

Designing custom products based on personality types

Translating Traits Into Buying Preferences

In my work with founders, the patterns that emerge from their data and customer interviews line up surprisingly well with how personality researchers describe extraversion and introversion. Extrovert-leaning customers talk about “showing off,” “starting conversations,” and “making a statement.” Introvert-leaning customers talk about “feeling like myself,” “something that makes me smile at my desk,” or “a subtle in-joke my friends get.”

You can map these tendencies into concrete design and merchandising decisions. The table below synthesizes insights from personality-driven marketing, consumer psychology, and UX research, and translates them into tactical options for a print-on-demand or dropshipping operation.

Dimension	Introvert-leaning customers	Extrovert-leaning customers	Implication for custom POD products
Communication preference	Often favor written, low-pressure channels like detailed emails and product pages that allow time to reflect, as personality marketing sources note.	More likely to engage with dynamic channels such as short videos, social stories, and live streams described in personality-based marketing guidance.	Offer rich written detail and clear specs for those who want to read, alongside short, energetic video or animated previews for those who prefer fast, visual impressions.
Social motivation	Tend to value depth over breadth in relationships and may use products to express identity within a small circle rather than to attract broad attention.	Often enjoy social environments and use products as conversation starters or status signals, consistent with research describing extroverts as attention-seeking and socially energetic.	Create design variants that work in small, intimate contexts (subtle references, inside jokes) and bold variants that pop in group settings or on social feeds.
Decision speed	More likely to appreciate time and information to decide, aligning with analytical buyer descriptions that emphasize thorough research.	Frequently decide faster when they see a clear, exciting outcome, as driver and expressive sales archetypes suggest.	Support both: provide comparison tables, FAQs, and reviews for deliberate buyers, and offer “quick buy” paths and strong calls to action for impulse-ready buyers.
Design tolerance for stimulation	Often comfortable with lower sensory stimulation and clear, uncluttered layouts, similar to how some high-sensitivity users prefer muted, low-density interfaces.	Often energized by richer stimulation, vibrant colors, and dense information, as UX research notes for highly extraverted users.	Offer minimalist design lines and calmer colorways next to more vibrant, pattern-heavy, or slogan-heavy versions of the same product.
Channel behavior	May gravitate toward solo browsing and direct email, in line with guidance that introverts favor channels suited to reflection.	Often are key targets for events, social media campaigns, and referral programs, as consumer-trait articles note for highly extraverted segments.	Use quieter, value-focused flows for email and on-site retargeting, and run socially shareable campaigns, contests, or group offers on social platforms.

These are not rigid rules, but they provide a structured way to think. The goal is not to guess whether a specific visitor is introverted or extroverted. The goal is to ensure your ecosystem has appealing paths for both.

Product Personality That Speaks To Both Sides

Psychology-based branding goes beyond logos and slogans. Work on “product personality” emphasizes that consumers routinely describe inanimate products with human traits. A ConfigureID case study, for example, defines product personality as the human characteristics consumers subconsciously attribute to a product, distinct from but related to brand personality. Research on brand personality, such as Jennifer Aaker’s framework reported in the marketing literature, describes five broad dimensions that consumers sense in brands: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness.

Luxury-brand archetype systems extend this further into characters like the Hero, Explorer, or Lover, each associated with different emotional tones, as brand strategists such as Nine Blaess demonstrate. The Branding Journal synthesizes these ideas and shows how companies like Nike, Apple, and Starbucks build powerful commercial results by leaning into particular personality dimensions.

For a print-on-demand business, this work is not just theoretical. You can design catalog lines where each product, or product family, has a deliberately crafted personality that can appeal in different ways to introverts and extroverts without fracturing your brand.

Imagine a “Creator–Explorer” brand archetype where your overarching brand personality emphasizes creativity and adventure. Within that frame, you might release a line of travel-themed apparel. Introvert-friendly variants might use a small, artful illustration of a mountain with a quiet phrase near the hem, intended for people who travel for inner reflection. Extrovert-friendly variants might use the same mountain but with a large, high-contrast graphic and a bold statement across the chest designed to spark conversations at airports and festivals. The underlying archetype is the same; the expression is tuned to different social comfort levels.

Research on product personality also reveals that brands can successfully maintain products with opposite personalities under one umbrella. Volkswagen’s Beetle and Touareg are frequently cited: one cheerful and friendly, the other tough and dominating, yet both coherent with the parent brand. That is the mindset you want in your catalog: clear, contrasting product personalities that are still recognizably “you.”

Print-on-demand and personalization technology make this particularly potent. The ConfigureID article on personalization stresses that letting customers customize products deepens identification with the product personality and fosters stronger loyalty. For introverts, that may mean subtle customization options such as hidden messages printed inside, monograms, or muted background patterns. For extroverts, it may mean oversized typography, loud color combinations they can assemble themselves, or add-on patches that make items unmistakably theirs.

Consumer psychology in dropshipping businesses

Storefront UX: Personality In The Buying Journey

Product personality is one half of the equation. The experience of discovering and customizing those products is the other. UX psychology research on “personalityzation” describes how interfaces that adapt to users’ Big Five traits can increase satisfaction and performance compared with static designs. In one e-learning study cited by UX designers, users high in emotional sensitivity preferred low information density, muted colors, and step-by-step navigation, while more extraverted users preferred denser information and vibrant colors. An adaptive interface that respected these preferences improved learning outcomes and satisfaction over a one-size-fits-all UI.

For your store, you probably will not build a fully adaptive interface driven by machine learning anytime soon. The ethical and technical hurdles are non-trivial; UX researchers point to privacy, consent, and cross-cultural variability as key concerns. But you can capture the spirit of this work in practical, low-tech ways.

One approach is to design adaptable rather than fully adaptive experiences, a distinction UX researchers have tested in other contexts. In adaptable systems, users choose their preferences. You might allow shoppers to toggle between a “Quick overview” and “In-depth details” view on product pages, or between a “Gallery-first” view and a “Specs-first” view. Extrovert-leaning visitors who like to scan bold visuals can stick with the default gallery emphasis, while more detail-seeking, introvert-leaning visitors can opt into a comfortable, text-rich layout.

The “Designing Personality” framework suggests treating products as social actors with consistent traits. For a print-on-demand store, that means your microcopy, error messages, and guidance around customization should reflect your chosen product personality without getting in the way. A fun, expressive brand might use warm, encouraging language when a customer experiments with different colorways, celebrating their creativity. A more competent, reassuring brand might emphasize clarity, sizing accuracy, and return policies in a calm, confident tone.

Critically, UX experts warn against letting personality harm usability. Clever or playful wording is helpful when it reduces friction and encourages exploration, but it becomes a liability when customers are trying to confirm order details, understand shipping times, or fix mistakes. This caution is especially important for introvert-leaning buyers, who often seek safety, clarity, and low-pressure environments. For them, transparent information architecture and straightforward copy act as psychological safety nets.

Finally, remember that your behavioral data contains indirect personality signals. The VR hypermarket research used navigation paths, posture, and interactions to classify Big Five traits with machine learning. You do not need the same sophistication to benefit from the principle. High bounce rates on loud, busy product pages combined with strong performance on minimalist detail pages tell you something. High engagement with social proof blocks, share buttons, and “bought together” sections tells you something else. Over time, you can adjust your default templates based on these behavioral patterns.

Introvert vs extrovert marketing strategies

Marketing And Ads For Both Introverts And Extroverts

Personality research in marketing emphasizes that tailoring not just creative, but the tone, pacing, and content of messaging to personality traits improves connection and conversion. Articles on personality-driven sales consistently describe four practical styles of buyers, such as Driver, Analytical, Amiable, and Expressive. Drivers want direct, outcome-focused conversations. Analytical buyers want data and clear explanations. Amiables seek trust, security, and low-pressure guidance. Expressives respond to stories, enthusiasm, and vision.

Underneath these labels, extraversion–introversion plays a significant role. Extrovert-leaning, expressive buyers tend to enjoy dynamic interactions and bold vision. Introvert-leaning, analytical buyers lean toward careful consideration and comprehensive information. Personality-based marketing guidance explains that introverts often gravitate toward direct email and written content that gives them space to reflect, while extroverts engage readily with interactive formats like video and social media experiences.

In practice, this suggests running at least two distinct creative strategies for your key product lines.

One strategy can be designed for extrovert-leaning audiences. Ads emphasize bold visuals, social scenes, and emotional payoffs: friends laughing over matching mugs, a creator wearing a statement hoodie at a crowded event, or an energetic unboxing of a highly customized planner. Copy focuses on identity expression, group belonging, and excitement. Calls to action are clear and dynamic: invitations to “show your side,” “make some noise,” or “start the conversation.”

The other strategy can be designed for introvert-leaning audiences. Ads highlight personal meaning, comfort, and self-alignment: a person quietly journaling with a customized notebook, a home office corner with a thoughtfully designed print, or a subtle piece of apparel that signals membership in a niche fandom without shouting. Copy emphasizes authenticity, quality, and long-term fit. Calls to action center on “finding your favorite,” “designing for your space,” or “building your quiet ritual.”

One of the strengths of print-on-demand is that you can support both without doubling your operational complexity. The underlying product can be identical; what changes are the design variants and the way you present them.

At the campaign level, personality-aware marketers also suggest defining and tracking key performance indicators by personality segment. Persana recommends, for example, watching conversion rates by personality-informed content type and gathering feedback on personalized experiences. While you may not have formal trait data, you can approximate segments by channel and creative. Compare how “quiet” campaigns perform in search and email versus how “loud” campaigns perform in social and influencer channels. Over time, this becomes a feedback loop that refines both your creative and your product designs.

Ethical considerations matter here. Several sources emphasize using personality insights to serve customers better rather than to manipulate them. Avoid fear-based tactics aimed at anxious, emotionally sensitive consumers. Make opt-outs and privacy choices obvious. Treat personality as a permission to communicate more clearly, not as a backdoor to override customer judgment.

Targeting personality traits in ecommerce

Pros And Cons Of Personality-Led Customization

Approaching your catalog and marketing through the lens of introversion and extraversion brings real advantages. It forces clarity about who you are designing for and why, which is the foundation of strong product–market fit. It naturally leads to a richer product personality, which branding experts like Jean-Noël Kapferer and Jennifer Aaker argue is central to building brand equity and emotional attachment. Personality-based targeting has already shown superior conversion performance in experimental work. For a print-on-demand business, where new variations are cheap to create and test, aligning designs with clear psychological profiles is a sensible way to de-risk innovation.

However, there are trade-offs. Over-indexing on personality can lead you into caricature. If every extrovert-facing product is extremely loud and every introvert-facing product is aggressively minimal, you will miss the many customers who sit near the middle of the spectrum or who express different traits in different contexts. Personality researchers repeatedly stress that traits are distributions, not boxes.

There is also the risk of harming usability. The UX literature warns against turning your interface into a theatrical performance of personality. The same applies to products. If you sacrifice legibility, durability, or comfort just to make something look “quirky” or “bold,” customers will feel the gap between your personality promise and product reality.

Finally, there are operational and ethical costs. Creating and managing more variations increases complexity. Collecting or inferring personality data raises privacy concerns, especially if you are tempted to blend data from multiple sources. Consumer neuroscience work highlights how much behavior is unconscious, which can tempt marketers to push beyond what customers would reasonably expect. Staying on the right side of trust means being transparent about personalization and giving people choices.

The question is not whether personality-led customization is inherently good or bad. The question is whether you can implement it in a way that stays aligned with your values, your capacity, and your customers’ long-term interests.

A Practical Roadmap For Smaller POD Brands

You do not need a research lab to start using these ideas. Begin with qualitative work: your own observations, reviews, and conversations. As you read through customer emails and social comments, note how often people use language that signals social versus solitary enjoyment. Phrases about “showing everyone,” “matching with friends,” or “wearing this to the party” hint toward extrovert-leaning motivations. Phrases about “my reading nook,” “morning coffee ritual,” or “therapy in a mug” hint toward introvert-leaning motivations.

Next, audit your current catalog against the introvert–extrovert spectrum. Look at your top sellers and ask, for each, whether its personality is primarily quiet, loud, or somewhere in between. Many brands discover they unintentionally favor one side. If your entire apparel line consists of large, slogan-heavy designs, you may be leaving money on the table from quieter customers who would prefer more subtlety. If everything is small and understated, you may be missing the “walking billboard” effect that socially confident fans can generate.

Then, choose a small number of hero products to redesign with dual appeal in mind. It is often easiest to start with one product family, like mugs, hoodies, or phone cases. For each hero product, develop at least two personality-aware variants that still fit your brand’s overall archetype. One might be tuned for intimate, personal satisfaction; the other for expressive, social visibility. Launch them in parallel and watch not just aggregate sales, but performance by channel, creative, and audience.

If you want more structured data, you can occasionally run short surveys that include a few personality items—drawing on validated short-form Big Five measures described in consumer psychology work—and simple questions about preferred shopping experiences. Many researchers now use brief ten-item inventories to approximate personality profiles in a lightweight way. You do not need to draw full trait maps for every shopper; even aggregated patterns, such as “our email subscribers skew more conscientious and introvert-leaning,” can inform product and UX decisions.

Throughout, define simple, behavior-based metrics that roughly correspond to personality-informed experiences. Personality marketing practitioners suggest tracking conversion rates separately for data-heavy pages versus story-heavy pages, for example, and monitoring engagement with community features versus solitary tools. These signals act as your practical feedback loop.

Most importantly, treat this as an iterative practice, not a one-time project. Personality-based UX researchers emphasize continual analysis and optimization. As you learn more about how your particular audience responds, you can refine your archetypes, prune products that do not fit, and lean harder into the personality spaces that clearly resonate.

FAQ

Do I need formal personality tests to design for introverts and extroverts?

Formal assessments like the MBTI or Big Five inventories are useful in research and corporate settings, and they have been widely adopted to understand people at work. For a print-on-demand store, you usually do not need to administer full tests to customers. Observed behavior, channel preferences, and qualitative feedback already provide strong clues. If you do collect personality data, keep it voluntary, lightweight, and transparent, following the ethical guidance emphasized in personality-based marketing and UX research.

Will focusing on introverts and extroverts limit my market?

Personality frameworks exist to highlight diversity, not to reduce it. Research on brand and product personality shows that strong brands often pick a small number of clear traits but still serve wide audiences through different product expressions. By designing with both introvert- and extrovert-leaning motivations in mind, you typically expand your reach rather than narrow it, provided you avoid stereotypes and keep room for customers who live near the middle of the spectrum.

How far should I go with personalization?

Work on product personalization platforms and personality-driven UX suggests that customization deepens identification and loyalty, but also raises complexity and privacy concerns. A pragmatic approach is to start with visible, low-risk options, such as choosing between quieter and louder design variants or toggling between “quick view” and “detailed view” on product pages. As your audience responds positively and your operations mature, you can layer on deeper personalization while staying transparent and respectful.

In the next wave of on-demand commerce, generic designs and one-speed shopping journeys will feel increasingly outdated. Merchants who understand personality, respect it, and design for both quiet and loud customers will build catalogs that people not only buy, but happily live with and talk about for years.

References

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