When Andy Mooney decided that he wanted a new guitar, he didn’t go to a shop to choose one. That's not because he's the CEO of Fender Musical Instruments, which build some of the world's most iconic guitars. No one would have had what he was looking for: a vintage blonde Telecaster with gold hardware, rosewood fingerboard, and locking tuners. Fender carries 125 signature electric guitars, but none of them fits that description. So Mooney turned to Mod Shop, Fender’s new online digital design studio, to create a custom axe.

The Mod Shop is like a Nike iD store for customizing guitars instead of shoes. Users choose from the companies most popular models—the Stratocaster and Telecaster guitars and the Jazz and Precision basses—and customize the color, fingerboard, pickups, tuners, bridges, and hardware color. Anything you build will cost $1,650 to $1,800.

This isn't Fender's first shot at a digital customization studio. Two years ago, it launched the "American Design Experience." It was ... comprehensive. Customers could select everything from the shape and material of the guitar's neck to the string action to the fit and finish of the case. All told, the site offered 1.3 million combinations. Customers found it overwhelming. The clunky interface didn't help: Each customizable option had its own page, if you chose a pickguard that made you reconsider the body color you'd already selected, you had to navigate all the way back to that page to change it.

What Fender needed was a friendlier tool with fewer options—and that meant being selective in determining which options to offer people.

Photograph: Fender

As it turned out, American Design Experience was a terrible user experience but a great source of data. Fender mined it to determine the most popular choices in every and eliminate the rest. The options that remain are “the white paint of what we do,” says Finlay Robb, who oversees the direct-to-consumer business. But even these offer 70,000 guitar permutations. Big, yes, but far fewer than 1.3 million. It's far less intimidating for consumers, and much easier for manufacturing. Fender uses standard components to build Mod Shop rigs, which lets it deliver the axe to your door within 30 days. The old system could take months.

Fender also improved the interface. You customize every component from the same page without navigating forward or backward. Clicking through the menu on the right lets you tweak components in whatever order you like. Users see in real time how tweaking one feature changes the look of the guitar. In a clever move, Fender created a snapshot feature so you can save and compare iterations. The goal, says Robb, was to give people the freedom to play with their creation while ushering them through the build process.

And Fender wants people to play with their guitars. Mooney says Mod Shop differs from most mass customization platforms by encouraging users to visit their local shop and work on their mods with a dealer. The online platform offers tips explaining how certain components work, but it’s not the same as getting the info in person. Fender is attempting to bridge the gap between online and in-store retail. It's a smart idea given that buying a guitar, especially one you've designed yourself, is as much about the experience as it is getting a new instrument.