Using favorite colors or cool nicknames to choose winners provides as good a chance as any scientific method.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Designers sell their merchandise directly from the site and are also able to poll potential customers about favorite colors and styles.

FORBES: Social Media Is Fashion's Newest Muse

Already, Nike with its Nike iD services lets customers personalize and design their own Nike merchandise, down to their favorite colors and materials.

FORBES: Written by Robert ��Buzz�� Kross

He is supposed to have said that his favorite colors were black and white, but he could be every bit the startling and seductive Venetian colorist when a commission required it.

NEWYORKER: Venetian Brass

One Sense of Fashion merchant, Francesca Audelo, who started a line of vintage- inspired hair accessories called FancyThat in Los Angeles, regularly polls her customers on everything from feather colors to favorite styles.

FORBES: Social Media Is Fashion's Newest Muse

You can swipe through images of up to four at time, slide the specs up and down your nose, favorite ones you like, change colors, share choices with your friends, and then pick up to four the company will ship to you to try on for real at home.

FORBES: Hate Trying On Glasses? A New App Ends The Misery

At Howe, one of my favorite shops in London, they paint Windsor chairs all sorts of glossy colors.

WSJ: Fifty Shades of Not Gray | Living Well

He's involved in every aspect of the business from discovering a new supplier of biodynamic Brazilian beans on a trip last fall to Espiritu Santo to the roasting to the choice of paint colors for the company's newest cafe (his current favorite is a grayish white called Benjamin Moore Dove Wing 960).

WSJ: Not the Same Old Grind: James Freeman of Blue Bottle | Creating