JBL Charge 4: A Versatile Speaker That Lets You Personalize the Design

For $120—the same price as an off-the-shelf model on the manufacturer’s website—JBL lets you order a Charge 4 and pick everything from the color scheme to the images and text printed on the fabric speaker grill. The company offers this feature on other speakers as well, including the smaller Flip 5 ($100) and Go 2 ($35) and the larger Xtreme 3 ($400), as well as earbuds starting at $49. If you’re willing to pass up the photos, you can tweak the color and text on a pair of JBL headphones, as well.

Customization like this is one of the wonders of modern manufacturing. You can buy $80 personalized Chuck Taylors from Converse (which I did) and $595 kicks from Dolce & Gabbana (I passed). In the world of clothing and home goods, there are myriad options, from socks with your dog’s face to monogrammed coffee mugs to an heirloom volume of your recipes or even a quilt featuring your family photos.

But personalized electronics are still in the nascent stage. Apple offers some devices, including AirPods customized with text or an emoji, and a company in Europe makes cool custom-printed fabric "grills" for the Ikea Frame speaker. And there’s a cottage industry that personalizes inexpensive speakers, earbuds, and other no-name devices for the corporate swag market, but those items often require a minimum order.

JBL takes it a step further.

When I went to the company’s online configurator, I was delighted and maybe even a bit overwhelmed by the range of options, given the device’s modest price. If I wanted to go basic, I could just pick a color for the plastic and another for the grill cloth and call it a day. Or simply tweak a design supplied by JBL or a fellow customer.

But I preferred to create a more personal statement and, for that, JBL offers a plethora of options, including stock patterns like stars and plaids and cute graphics that bend toward cool or cheesy, depending on your personal aesthetic. 

I’m a car geek and vIntage Porsches have this great houndstooth-like upholstery pattern called Pepita. So I started with a photo detailing that pattern and spent an hour scaling it, enlarging it, shifting it, tilting it, and un-tilting it until the pattern wrapped the speaker just so. While you can do this on a phone, I found it much easier to adjust and view the results on my laptop.

I then played with different color combinations for the plastic. Black seemed a little stark. Red was a little bright. But a hue that resembled Porsche’s sea blue leather proved to be the winner. 

I even printed an inside joke in German on the speaker. (Porsche fan Jerry Seinfeld is always annoyed about how people use the phrase "water cooled" to describe newer Porsches because, after all, you wouldn’t drink what’s in a 911’s radiator.) So my speaker also wears the phrase flüssigkeitsgekühlt (aka liquid-cooled) in bright yellow on the back.

Once I had settled on each detail in the design, I pushed send and I waited. Despite the ensuing holiday rush, my personalized speaker came nine days later, well within the 7-10 business-day window JBL had promised.

How’d it come out? Pretty well, if I do say so myself. The black-and-white graphics look great from a distance. Close up, too. The colors are true to what I saw on my laptop screen. And the yellow type on the back is easy to read and appropriately inscrutable.

What if you want an even more ambitiously tailored speaker, one with pictures of your friends or your dog or Frida Kahlo? For expert advice on how to design your personal masterpiece, I talked to Sheri Geller, an associate art director at Consumer Reports. During a distinguished career in magazines, she has directed photo shoots, designed eye-catching layouts, and more to the point selected images that print well in a range of formats well beyond the paper and ink of publishing.

Here’s what she told me.

Select a high-quality image. "You don’t want anything that’s dark," she says, because images tend to darken further during the printing process.

Contrast is also important. "If it’s a shot of a person, choose one that’s well lit with good separation between the subject and the background." A shot of someone against a plain wall or even the sky? Ideal. A shot where someone’s hair blends into the backyard trees? Not so great.

One easy way to check out the image is just to squint or look at it from across the room. For a more precise review, print the image out and make a black-and-white photo copy. That low-fi rendering will show you what’s likely to stand out and what might turn into mud.

Make sure it’s sharp. Smartphone photos look great on a little screen. But when you enlarge them, they often lack the resolution you need. Bad focus and blurring can also pose a problem. Before settling on an image, look carefully to see if it’s fairly crisp, even beyond the focal point. If it’s on your phone, pinch with two fingers and spread them apart to enlarge portions of the photo to see if they get fuzzy. 

Be decisive with color. When it comes to the color palette, Geller suggests going bold or at least being clear on what you’re aiming for. "You want to work with your image or completely against it," she advises. If you want a funky bright color, follow your heart. "If you want your design to feel cohesive, pick a tone in the photo and match it. Or pick a complementary color—one opposite it on the color wheel, like you learned in art class," she says. 

The preview tools on JBL’s website help ensure that you’re really happy with the finished product. Rotate the design, inspecting the top, bottom, and sides. If it’s not quite ideal, zooming in or out on the image or tweaking the tilt and the framing can be the difference between a what-a-nice-thought gift and one with perfect personalization.