Looking to gift someone with something personalized that also serves a practical purpose?

Or want to treat yourself to a small present “just because”?

In either of these situations, you’ll have a lot of fun designing your own custom car air freshener.

If you’ve never designed a personalized air freshener before, the good news is that it’s pretty easy. You don’t have to do any of the actual production work yourself—you just pick how you want the design to look.

Here, we’re outlining the five steps involved in designing a custom car air freshener on sites like Make My Freshener, which we have concluded as the best car freshener website.

Choose Your Shape

Your first task will be to choose your preferred air freshener shape. You can either go with a custom shape or keep things simple with a stock shape (your more typical circles, rectangles, and shields, as well as premium options like bubbles, t-shirts, and car shapes, depending on the brand you go with).

Custom shapes are the more exciting option and can look better when you’re using your own photo in your design. For instance, if you’re gifting someone an air freshener with a photo of their pet’s face, it’ll look much more effective if the design itself is shaped like their pet’s head.

Upload Your Image

We recommend using your own images in a custom car air freshener design for the most unique end result. In this case, your next step will be to upload your chosen image (make sure it’s high-res so it doesn’t blur once the design is printed).

If you’ve gone with a custom shape, the website you’re ordering on should automatically crop the image to fit perfectly into the design, or you may be asked to trace the outline of the image to be cropped yourself.

Approve the Artwork

Once you’ve uploaded your image, you’ll be shown a mockup of your design and asked to approve it to move forward.

Now’s the time to check that you’re happy with how the image has been cropped and the placement of the punched hole for the hanging string.

Pick Your Fragrance

With the design done, you can now focus on how you want your air freshener to smell. Here’s where the best websites really stand out for offering 15+ scents, from the classic options like vanilla, citrus, and pine, to the more unusual scents like cherry, guava, and sweet pea.

Choose a scent that you already know you love. If you’re not sure, you can’t go wrong with vanilla, which was found in a study to be the most universally-loved scent across the world.

Order and Pay

The final step is to confirm your order, select your preferred postage, check pricing, and pay for your air freshener.

If you’re planning on ordering multiple designs (to hand out at business conventions, for example), it’s best to buy just one design first, so you can check that everything looks great before you commit to a bigger order.