Mass Customization & Open Innovation News

"Niching the niche": Observations from my visit at Zazzle's Silicon Valley HQs

How Zazzle is still growing with mass customization despite -- or just because of -- the economic downturn … and ten other facts that make this platform special

I recently had the opportunity to pay Zazzle an extended visit at their Silicon Valley Headquarters. Here is what I learned during this day:

Zazzle was founded by Bobby and Jeff Beaver as students at Stanford University. The unfulfilled need of a user again was the mother of invention: The two brothers wanted to create a cool t-shirt to advertise a party at their fraternity (in order to "draw in plenty of nice girls"). They realized how difficult it was at that time to get high-quality custom t-shirts without having to order larger quantities at a promotions company or to rely on the low quality of heat-transfer at the local copy store. Well, it didn't work out with the girls at that party, but the rest is history:

Since Zazzle's launch in 2003, its focus always has been on technology. It started with unique digital custom printing technologies that allowed the founders to really get high quality products out at a not known quality (at this time). Today, in every presentation Zazzle stresses the fact that being leading edge in technology is what makes them special.

It may be the proximity to the many technology companies in their area that keeps them emphasizing the technology part – but I do not see Zazzle as a technology company – they are a "market maker". In my opinion, their core capability is to create new markets for products that before could not be exploited in any way.

Sheryl Graham called this "Niching the niche". Sheryl is a Zazzle Proseller, making her living by creating products on the Zazzle platform and selling them to others (http://www.zazzle.com/sagart1952) -- most of them appealing just to a very small audience that traditional companies neither can recognize nor capture.

Starting from the scratch without any ballast or old knowledge or constraints, Zazzle created a mass customization ecosystem that has a number of unique features. Here are my ten points that make Zazzle special:

1.    Niching the niches: The unique vale proposition of Zazzle comes from utilizing the broadest possible scope of needs. Each day, about 50K new products are being created, most addressing a very tiny demand – but in total, this sums up. This also allows them to operate with almost no clear definition of target groups or target customer segments: While the "soccer mom" is the single largest customer of Zazzle, it is by far not its majority. The platform is build to cater to all different groups and clients.

2.    Event driven Marketing: The broad scope of users at Zazzle drives a lot of event-driven business beyond the traditional seasons. There is not just the wedding-season, but their has been Obama-Season, Client-#9-Season, Tax-Day-Season and so on … The core business driver is to enable (local) users with some very specific domain expertise to create products immediately for/after a special event in this domain.

3.    24-hour turnaround for most orders: While most mass customizers need weeks to fulfill an order, Zazzle very early realized that being able to process an order in 24 hours opens many more markets (think of the entire last-minute gift market).

4.    Modular manufacturing system: Their manufacturing system (in San Jose, CA) is build highly automated so that it can balance large spikes in demand without accumulating too high cost. In addition, a highly flexible work force allows to cover different demand cycles.

5.    Real-time rendering and focus on user experience: Zazzle has some impressive rendering capabilities that allow the website to create any product in any specification in very high quality virtualization in real-time. While many other mass customizers still work with pre-fabricated pictures, here everything is rendered just on the spot.

This also enables another signature feature: Showcasing all products in different settings: Most products can be virtually placed on many different models. Zazzle realized that not all designs fit to same style of mannequin. This also caters to the broad scope of clients that utilize the Zazzle platform.

Or consider the "stitching simulation videos" when you choose custom embroidery. This allows the user to see how detailed the self-created pictures will be produced – also contributing to the user experience and quality perception of pro-users of the site.

6.    Allowing clients to focus: Strong focus on creating a flexible platform for different kinds of relationships with different vendors. Their theme: "How to allow our clients to specialize on what they are really good at, and still sell an integrated offering at the same time". So, a traditional company like Pittney Bowes (zazzle.pb.com) can create its own custom goods offering on the same platform as a very design-driven initiative like artsprojekt.com. Compare the sites: They look extremely different, but are based on the same platform and fulfillment system.

7.    Relationships with brands: Zazzle has build some very strong relationships with brands like Disney and the Star Wars Enterprise that allowed these companies to go beyond merchandising and offer real "fan-based content".

8.    Openness and opportunity-driven growth: Zazzle created a platform that is flexible enough (with the help of their great engineers) so that vendors can come in and get (almost) any product they would like to offer customized.  There is no general restriction for new products. New assortment creation is driven by the clients and users.

9.    Generating customer knowledge: Zazzle enables brands and established companies to use Zazzle as a platform for experimentation and testing that even makes money. Disney used Zazzle to allow customization of products with the characters of the movie "Cars", and their large retail clients used the popularity of characters selected by Zazzle users to predict the number of merchandises products in large scale. Creating these aggregated customer knowledge became a large benefit for Disney.

10.    Growing strongly despite the present economic downturn: Although Zazzle realizes the slower economy, they still grow with high double digit figures. Corporate clients use the on-demand opportunities in these times as a more efficient way to create special assortments compared to building large inventories. And consumers that postpone shopping for high-priced items still use the affordable Zazzle products to get a high-touch emotional products ("if I cannot afford the diamond ring for my girlfriend right now, I still can give her a great custom made t-shirt as an emotional gift").

But Zazzle also has to focus on a number of challenges:

• Create a site and corporate image that appeals to many different stakeholders, from brand managers at Disney to freelance independent designers in the Gothic Scene, all using the same platform to distribute their products.
• Manage client conflicts: Zazzle enables its corporate clients to extend their assortment into the custom product line, but at the same time, Zazzle also creates competing assortments by other vendors in the same category. This can lead to channel conflict.
• Educate their customers: Being ahead in technology and mass-customization-thinking, Zazzle has to educate it different kinds of users what it is able to do – and what they are able to do with Zazzle.
• To keep technology leadership, continuous investments in the technology platform is required, also including more and more complex integration of new technologies into the current platform.
• How to grow really big: While Zazzle had remarkable growth in the past, it still has to become the Google of products. What is their strategy to put all the existing amazing technologies and market knowledge together and to create really scalable growth beyond the niches?

So I think we should stay tuned what Zazzle (and their equally strong competitors like Cafepress and Spreadshirt) are turning out in the next months … these are some of the most interesting players in the mass customization market out there in the moment.

Context: Zazzle Blog

Interview: Joel Yatscoff of Joy de Vivre on Microfinanced Crowdsourcing and How He Helps Creative Designers to Get Their Products Out to Consumers

I recently wrote in this blog about Joy de Vivre, the Toronto based company that lets consumers vote on its product assortments. In this interview, founder Joel Yatscoff provides us more information about his vision, how the idea got started (Joy de Vivre seems to be again a typical case of an user innovation, originating from a frustrated user), about first successes and challenges, and what is coming next. His basic motive of democratizing the process how designers can get their products out to consumers, bypassing the power of traditional manufacturers of choosing and investing in designs, reminds me of Ronen Kadushi's idea of open design – different approach to the same problem.

Joel Yatscoff is a Toronto-based product designer. Originally from Beaumont, a small French Community in Alberta, he later studied at the University of Alberta and received his Bachelor of Design with Distinction in 2003.  Currently working in a product development consultancy in Toronto, Joel has also interned at Karim Rashid in New York City in 2002.  He has been recognized nationally and internationally for his roles as a freelance, collaborating, and supporting designer by the Chicago Athenaeum Good Design Award, IDEA, and Conduit National Design Competition.  Joel is also pursuing post-graduate studies in design management at Ryerson University.

Frank T. Piller: Joel, what was the insight and inspiration that motivated you to start Joy de Vivre?

Joel Yatscoff: I had been tinkering around with this concept since about 2006.  I had been out of post-secondary studies for 3 years and had been pitching some really great ideas [of product designs] to companies in New York with my good friend and business partner Bradley Price.  As I remember, it was about our 3rd consecutive year of pitching concepts with limited success.  I was getting really frustrated with how our great ideas were only receiving lukewarm reception but the company was producing real garbage.  We were biased towards our work of course, but it really seemed like frustrating process where we were acting more like salesmen than designers.  This was really the start, thinking there must be a better way for designer to get their great ideas to market.

At some point I remember hearing about Muhammad Yunus’ Nobel prize for micro-loans.  I found the concept of raising money through small increments very inspiring.  I think that lodged somewhere in my head and I thought it made sense to raise the great sums of money required for consumer product manufacturing.

I slowly formulated the business structure in my head and was encouraged to write a business plan to clarify and refine my concept.  I also began to notice that a few companies were really starting to use crowdsourcing to develop goods and it was only a matter of time until someone decided to apply it to consumer products.  As I didn’t want to regret not giving it a shot, I plunged in.  I took the fall of 2008 off from my continuing education studies in design management to devote time towards setting up the business.  And here we are now, 2 months in.

FTP: What are the first experiences with Joy de Vivre? Which reactions did you get, and what are your early users saying?

JY: The first experiences are very, very positive.  Everyone is very excited about the idea and really hope that it works out for us.  Our sales and traffic are slowly increasing, but am impressed with the impact we have made in just over 60 days.  Most interesting is following we have developed from Australia, Germany, and Israel.

FTP: Can you tell us a bit more about yourself? Do you have any personal experience with crowdsourcing?

JY: By education and experience I am a product design that has been practicing since I graduated from University in 2003.  I’ve had the opportunity to work as an in-house, freelance, and consultancy-based designer.  These jobs have allowed me to work on projects that range from municipal water treatment products and peritoneal dialysis machines, to dog toys and water bottles.  I have a real passion for well designed products and love the industry.  Other than that, I’m getting married in July and realized a year ago that I should have been sailing my entire life.

I don’t have any real first hand experiences with crowdsourcing other than my fiancé buying shirts from Threadless.com.  I wouldn’t say I’ve studied crowdsourcing or anything, I just find it a natural process.  As the old adage goes, “many hands make light work.”  The internet has allowed many more “hands” to get involved than would have been possible in the past.

FTP: How do you think Joy de Vivre is different to similar crowdsourcing companies? How do you want to make it special?

JY: Currently, no one else is using crowdsourcing to procure new ideas for consumer products and fund them.  Some sites are using crowdsourcing to spotlight products or designers, to source all their designs like threadless.com, or fund the upcoming albums of new bands, but no one has applied this to capital intensive projects like consumer products.   This is the biggest difference.  

Threadless does a great job procuring really great graphic designs and then has a small investment to bring them to market (buying the shirts, creating the silk screens, etc...). But consumer products are quite different.  We still have to procure the ideas but we also have to pay for substantial costs upfront before anything is made.  Tooling costs for consumer products start in the tens of thousands of dollars and can get into the hundreds of thousands of ideas very quickly.  This is why we pre-sell the products: we raise the money to pay for all the capital costs.  It significantly reduces any financial risk we take on and eliminates the risk for the consumer as we refund any money if the product is not fully funded.

We really want to make Joy de Vivre special by offering designers an outlet where they are encouraged to submit their ideas (not rejected like at most traditional manufacturers), offered fair, competitive compensation, sell really well designed, beautiful, and functional products, and reward our community by compensating them for helping to fund the product’s development.

FTP: What is the source of the designs? Who are your first designers?

JY: The first product we made available for funding, Cellule, was designed by Bradley Price and myself.  We had designed this modular lattice a long time ago and I always thought it was great idea and was puzzled why no manufacturers had jumped on it.  It seemed natural to launch with this product as it seemed symbolic of why I founded the company.  The second product, Terence Cooke’s “Fruity Bowl”, was a submission (full disclosure, I’ve known Terence for several years).  From this point, we will only be making products available for purchase that proves popular from our community.  This is in keeping with our crowdsourced model and will really help ensure whatever is made available for purchase will sell really well.

We should have no shortage of good ideas that will be submitted to our website.  Most product designers are always tinkering in their spare time to either build up their portfolios, create submissions for design competitions, or to pitch new concepts to manufacturers.  In time we hope that designers will be designing product just for us and then we will have a steady stream of product ideas.
 We will hopefully be giving all these beautiful, orphaned ideas a good home.

FTP: You also announced an open design competition. How will this take work?

JY: Yes, in a sense we are running an ongoing design competition.  Unlike traditional manufacturers, we are encouraging designers and innovators to send in their product ideas.  Normally, it is very difficult to make a good contact in an organization to pitch your ideas and most of the times they don’t accept design submissions if they have not asked for them.

We have now setup a submissions and voting platform where designers can submit their product ideas and our community can vote on them.  Popular ideas rise and less popular ideas sink.  We will be closely monitoring the submissions and ideas that do really well be chosen for production.  The submission process is really easy: all a designer has to do is upload a short description of the product and a few nice images.  The onus is on them to clearly communicate what the product is and really sell to the community.

FTP: A critical success factor for your business will be to gather a large enough crowd that follows the proposals and votes for them (with their money). How do you plan to create this movement?

JY: I couldn’t agree more, a big crowd makes or breaks this model.  We have a promotion strategy that has several fronts to get the crowds to us.

First, if a designer has a product made available for funding or voting, he/she has an incentive to spread the message to friends and family.  The more votes or purchases of that designer’s product the better its chances getting picked for production or become fully funded respectively.  We also hope that our consumers will spread the message.  Since we are rewarding everyone who helps to fund a product’s development, there is an incentive on the purchaser to tell friends and family about their purchase and encourage them to also buy.  More sales greatly increase the likelihood of a product being manufactured.  It is word of mouth advertising and is very potent.  We’ve already had purchasers of our first product promote the product and generate additional sales.

Second, we promote all the products that are made available for funding.  We have begun developing an extensive network of online and traditional media to publicize our new product offerings.  We are now able to send out a press release to a few select blogs and be quite confident of receiving a posting.  This allows us to very quickly disseminate a press release and really ramp the site traffic up.

Finally, we will be complementing the product promotion with our blog.  The blog highlights emerging designers and great products which are not being manufactured.  The blog combined with the submission/voting forum will slowly build up the community and make us a hub for emerging designers and products are not in production.  We are aware of how long this may take, but we are slowly getting there and have been surpassing all our site traffic targets to date.

FTP: In general, what are recent trends you see with regard to crowdsourcing and open innovation? What will be next?

JY: I see many more companies forming like us but for specialized products and services.  You already see many bands raising the funds to record their next albums through crowdsourcing models.  I’ve heard most recently of over $75,000 being raised for a female artist to record her latest album.  Her last track on the album has her singing out all the names of the people who helped raise the funds.  

With this kind of money able to be raised, it really opens doors to many more types of products and services.  The effect will likely be thousands of smaller companies using crowdsourcing and micro-financing to make product and services.  While I don’t believe the traditional Ikea’s will ever disappear, the consumer will have a lot more available to them because they will be helping to define what they want.

For more information, visit joydevivre.org or contact Joel Yatscoff at
joel (at) joydevivre.org or 364 King St. East, Toronto, Ontario M5A-1K9, Canada

Joy de Vivre: Collective Customer Commitment and Crowdsourcing in action at this Canadian startup

Via Burkhard Schneider's Blog, I got notice of Toronto, Canada, based Joy de Vivre. The start-up opened its doors last month and is entirely based on the concept of "collective customer commitment" that I described in 2006 in a MIT Sloan Management Review Article with Susumu Ogawa: Get the commitment of customers via crowdsourcing first before you invest in final product development and production.

On their website, Joy de Vivre descirbe their concept as follows:

"Product development is very expensive due to the high capital costs involved with prototyping, tooling, marketing, and distribution of products. Thousands of great ideas never make it to market because a manufacturer is not willing to risk money on development costs.

Using the crowdsourcing potential of the internet, these costs can be distributed over many people, making the individual costs affordable. We raise the capital required to manufacture a product by pre-selling its production. The retail price paid by you, our community of engaged consumers, is placed a development fund. This small figure, multiplied by hundreds or thousands of people, fully funds the product development costs. Designers get their idea made, you receive your product, and we all share in bringing a great idea to life. If the product doesn’t get fully funded, you get your money back."

One of the two products recently listed on the site is the "Fruity Bowl", a -- surprise -- Fruit Bowl for $34.00. Designed by Terence Cooke, the company calculated that they have to pre-sell 1500 units of this product to go into production, The clock is ticking, 105 days to go. Remember: While the pictures look great, Fruity has not yet been manufactured. In order to bring Fruity to life, customers have to fund it. The funding period for Fruity lasts for 16 weeks beginning from its first sale. Within this time period, Fruity needs to sell a minimum of 1500 units to be manufactured. If Fruity is not fully funded within the 16 week period, all purchases are refunded within 4 days.

For a more comprehensive description of their approach, go here: http://www.joydevivre.org/pages/how-this-works

I am curious to see whether this will work. Its success strongly will depend from (1) the buzz the company can create to generate traffic and bring potential customer-investors to their site; and (2) the quality and appeal of the designs. But Threadless has shown that the basic model works! So let's follow how Joy de Vivre is doing.

DemandMade launches YERZIES.com, extending apparel customization beyond screen printing by providing users access to advanced manufacturing methods

News from DemandMade and Scott Killian. Scott, together with his business partner Tim Brule, launched Yerzies.com, an online marketplace that "allows anyone to create, purchase or sell their own customized tee shirts, hoodies and other apparel items."  

Sounds familiar? Yes, Zazzle, Spreadshirt, Cafepress, any many more offer the same. But the differences are in the detail.  

Asked how Yerzies is different, Scott answers: "Although other Websites exist that allow you to design a tee shirt, we've dramatically expanded the variety of creative options and developed new approaches to the way users can profit from their creations."

Read an interview with Scott Killian in the next posting in this blog!

Beyond printed tee shirts, Yerzies enables the creation of stitched sweatshirts and mixed-media designs that include many advanced processes to create apparel which more closely resembles the design trends seen at retail. Yerzies' innovative product configurator allows users to access an unprecedented array of creative options including printing on dark garments, metallic foils, flocks, glitters, glow-in-the-dark materials, and stitched processes.

Buyers are also invited to "Make it Yerz", a feature that allows users to mix and match product options and in some cases, even make modifications to the content created by other users. Yerzies has also reengineered the way user-generated content is marketed.

When users are finished, they can purchase as little as one piece or sell their creations to the Yerzies community and keep the profits. All products are produced on-demand.

Yerzies thus combines advanced new manufacturing techniques with an innovative approach to crowd sourcing. It is another example of the developing trend of user manufacturing and my hypothesis that users are getting more and more advanced manufacturing technology in their hands.

In addition to providing a platform for user-generated content, Yerzies has also licensed content from third-parties including typefaces from designers such as Ray Larabie which users can incorporate into their designs.

Scott: "Helvetica and Times Roman might work nicely for writing a novel, but they don't necessarily look great on a hooded sweatshirt. We've licensed trend-right typefaces that will actually look cool on a tee shirt or hoodie."

The story behind Yerzies: An interview with Scott Killian.

Personal Fabrication for Dummies -- Teaching Videos at Replicator, Inc.

I just discovered the great new blog by Joseph Flaherty, founder of a start-up called Replicator, Inc. While the company will launch in full speed in February 2009, they already were quite successful in securing seed money and attention in a number of important start-up competitions (MIT 100K  (semi-finals), Princeton (semi-finals), and the Rhode Island Business Plan Competition (runner up prize winner)).

I hope that we can meet Joseph at the MIT Smart Customization Seminar in three weeks.

Replicator, Inc., manufactures and sells custom consumer products. Their first product is custom jewelry for tween and teenage girls, sold under the name WhirlyBelle. This is made possible by combining web-based design tools with custom manufacturing

His company blog not just has a recent posting about 47 words you can not use on custom Nike sneakers (which I do not quote here to get my blog not banned from your corporate content filter). In another posting, he has a great chart about the price premiums you can gain with mass customization:

A great number of postings covers user manufacturing and the new opportunities for users to produce anything they want. In one of my favorite posts, Joseph explains all technologies that enable personal fabrication. You probably also could Google those, but Joseph created a great posting with small videos explaining all technologies.

Many people think 3D printers are the way this will happen, but there are half a dozen other amazing technologies that allow people to make anything they can imagine.

While by no means an exhaustive list, his list is a is a very convenient overview for anyone interested in how the idea user co-design meets manufacturing. As Joseph writes:

"Combined with web-based design tools these technologies could enable a change as profound as the industrial revolution: increasing the options for customers while reducing the environmental impact."

His posting shows examples of these machines in action and provides a glimpse of what is possible already today:

1. 3D Printers (some notable examples: Z Corp., Dimension, 3d systems, Objet, Desktop Factory, Paragon Lake, Figure Prints, EOS)

2. Laser Cutters  (Notable Examples: Epilog, Trotec, Etchstar, Ponoko, VersaLaser)

3. Waterjet Cutters (Notable Examples: OMAX, Flow Corp, OCC)

4. 2D Plotter Cutters (Notable Examples: Cricut, CraftRobo, Xyron)

5. Print on Demand (Notable Companies: Blurb, Lulu, Shutterfly)

6. Direct To Garment Printing (Notable Companies: Cafe Press, Zazzle, Spreadshirt, Spoonflower)

7. CNC Milling (Notable Examples: eMachine Shop, Tech Shop, Craftsman Compucarve)

8. CNC Embroidery (Notable Examples: Singer, Brother, Toyota)

9. Cut & Sew Construction (Notable Examples: NIKEiD, Timbuk2, Freitag)

10. 3D Scanning (Notable Examples: Z Corp., Next Engine, 3D Digital Corp., Corpus-e)

Go to his web site to watch all videos

Hard Copies: New Open Designs by Ronen Kadushin

An exhibition at Appel Design Gallery, Berlin 1-22 Nov. 2008 -- and an invitation to download all design and place it on your local CNC machine.

Now we have Ponoko, eMachineshop, JuJups, Shapedays, etc to produce what ever come to our mind in an easy way. But still, at least I don't have every day a nice idea for a great coffee table in my mind.

This is where Ronen Kadushin comes in. I wrote about this Berlin-based designer before. Ronen's idea is to publish all his designs under a CC Creative Commons license( by-nc-sa). So whenever you have access to a CNC cutting facility, you can get his designs:

As Ronen describes: 

"Open Design products flow with an essential cultural wave: towards freer information, Web-based collaborations and open-source methods. In Open Design anyone can download and produce my designs for free. Open Designs encourage modification, redistribution, and direct contact with the designer. I would only ask producers to share with me revenues from commercial uses. This means that with no tooling investment, you can produce Open Design products independently."

All object rely on a very clever 2D digital start point, which makes them easy to alter into new shapes and uses, and they are flat packed. “Hard copies” of the designs can be ordered from any CNC cutting facility that’s local to you, your consumers, or distributors. Ronen's idea is that designs that typically live only a few years in the marketplace can live on and develop.

Still, at the same time, Ronen needs to earn some money. Generating fame and buzz and getting his name out is one of the intentions of the Open Design project. But he also produces some of his collections in high quality and exhibits (and sells) them in an annual exhibition at a Gallery in Berlin.

He says about his new exhibition: 

"This Open Design collection of lighting and furniture limited editions is playing a double role. As gallery pieces, they express my personal style: simple, effortless and humorous. But they also relate to wider cultural issues and offer a designer an alternative course to consumer products, especially relevant in economically troubled times.

There is a feeling about Open Design I would like to convey. Making products this way is, for me, mind clearing and fun. You can feel as good about the Open Design production process, its low environmental footprint, and what it stands for, as you do about the objects themselves."

Context information:
- Freely download the Open Designs and more from www.ronen-kadushin.com
- Order them at Appel Design Gallery, Berlin, www.appel-design.com

Exhibition at:
Appel Design Gallery
Torstr. 114, 10119 Berlin, Germany
phone: +49 (0)30 32 51 81 60
info@appel-design.com

The next generation of user design: Forget about CAD, just handdraw your design, and Ponoko will make it

While this may be small step for mankind, it is a large step for user co-design and customization. Until today, users who wanted to get a custom product had to be able to use at least an online configurator, or, in case they wanted larger freedom of creation as offered by user manufacturing sites like Ponoko, eMachineshop, Shapeways, Fabidoo, or others, they had to be able to use some graphik design software.

Now Ponoko makes co-designing even more intuitive and easier. The crew today launched their service Photomake. It turns digital photos of hand drawings into real products simply by uploading them to the Ponoko website.

The company is again one step further to its mission of making "it super simple for anyone to make anything that is on their mind, at low cost."

Previously at Techcrunch40, Ponoko launched Designmake for designers to make things on demand – over 10,000 have signed up. Earlier this year, they also launched Ponoko ID for shoppers to request goods to be made just for them by these designers. Now with Photomake they're inviting creative people who don't know how to use design software to participate simply by sketching what they want on a piece of paper and uploading a photo of it to get it made.

Derek Elley from Ponoko said in an e-mail that "One of the cool things about Photomake is the quality of the result – it's truly hand drawn. Because digital making is so very precise every tiny bump in the hand drawn creation is picked up and made for real. This gives a very natural and human feel to the things you make."

The trick behind Photomake is some very clever file conversion technology that is more accurate than anything that has come before it. It is designed so that what you draw is what is made, without any touching up required in a design software program.

This is a major revolution in the democratization of design and innovation. We know from empirical research that many users innovate and have creative ideas ahead of the market. Up to today, they either needed a manufacturer listening to them and turning their ideas into products. Or they had to have specific skills to turn their ideas by themselves into a design and get it produced. The later process was made much easier in the last few years, but still required skills in using design software and how to place a design on a machine. Now, even this hurdle blurs ... driven by new technology that allows this process at rather low cost.

So, go ahead and just hand draw your next Christmas presents.

Context:
- Press release by Ponoko on their new service.
- Video showing the entire process: http://www.ponoko.com/photomake
- On the upcoming MIT Smart Customization seminar, Cathy Lewis, CEO of Desktop Factory, will present what will be next: Transfer your custom designs into products in your home as easy as today printing a document.

Shapeways Launches Consumer-Focused Customizable 3D Merchandise Platform

Shapeways is spinning-out from the Lifestyle Incubator of Royal Philips Electronics, located in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. The site can be seen in the lines of Ponoko, Zapfab and other user manufacturing sites allowing users to create and manufacture their own design with a large freedom of design.

The site very neatly incorporates all elements of a good user manufacturing system I outlined some time ago in this blog:

- A 3D model library
- An easy-to-operate 3D-design toolkit (well, not at this stage yet)
- A flexile manufacturing system producing the users' design (more or less) rapidely

Utilizing a 3D model library, (starting with a lamp and a bowl), consumers can manipulate the structure, look and feel of their own products. Users can twist, mash, and create their own 3D objects which then are being produced within 10-days or less. Shapeways then verifies objects to ensure printability and provides a real-time cost estimate. Within 10 working days, a tangible 3D product will be produced and arrive at the consumer's home globally.

Browsing over the site, it still looks a bit beta, and their co-design toolkits is an external Java-based software that demands quite some time to download and install separately. Using it then however was easy (despite some annoying comments that I should create a profile). But it is a start ...

Anyway, Shapeways takes a major step towards the next generation of consumer co-creation and mass customization. Consumers without 3D modeling skills can shape, mash, imprint and design their own 3D products at Shapeways.com. Products are produced with a rapid manufacturing system, and in the moment they all still have this white prototyping look :-)

From lamps with a personal message to fruit bowls linking back to memorable moments, the Shapeways Creator Engine has a beta library of predesigned product templates which the company will grow rapidly over 2009.

"We recognize the desire of consumers who want to own or give something that is unique and has their special, personal touch," Peter Weijmarshausen, CEO of Shapeways, is quoted in a press release.

"With the Creator Engine, now anyone can participate in the artistic process and create something that is truly a reflection of their own needs and tastes. With the Creator Engine, we have broken the currently existingtrade-off between freedom of design and the complexity of the design process."

Shapeways can be seen as a new application of rapid manufacturing in the consumer space. I recently attended the Rapid Manufacturing Conference at Loughborough University. While a posting on this event is overdue since weeks (especially after Jochen Krisch invited one publicly), I refer you to Matt Sinclairs's great report about this conference which also provides you much more insights in the kind of products we can expect in the future on platforms of Shapeways.

Context:

- My earlier posts on Fabbing and Rapid Manufacturing.

- Matt Sinclair's report on the 3rd RM Conference

Keds & Zazzle Are Bringing Footwear Customization to a New Dimension

(updated - Aug 13, 2008) Customizing footwear has been a long theme in this blog. RYZwear recently offered a fresh approach to this (see my report), and now the evolution of custom footwear continued one more step. US shoe brand Keds just launched its new custom footwear offering, called Kedsstudio.com. While looking at the first glimpse like a copy of NikeID or Timberland's Custom, a closer look on the site convinced me that Keds went much further.

Keds is an iconic US brand that actually invented the term ‘sneaker’. Since 1916, Keds is offering its classic champion sneaker and a large variety of other styles. Keds is a subsidiary of the Stride Rite Corporation, which again is a unit of Collective Brands, Inc.. Collective Brands is the owner of Payless ShoeSource, a more than 4,500-store retail chain in footwear, and thus one of the very big guys in the international footwear market.

With kedsstudio.com, they created a mass customization offering that goes far beyond the present state of the art in this industry. Their advancements are with regard to two dimensions:

First, users can upload any design or picture on their shoe. So it is not just picking color options for pre-defined components of a shoe, but really getting what you want. Shoes are manufactured with an advanced digital printing technology that offers great variety in high quality. The customized sneakers are produced in China within 24 to 48 hours, and will be received by consumers within one to two weeks, depending upon the shipping method selected.

Secondly, and more interesting, Keds is one of the best examples of a new trend in mass customization: Keds actually did not build any mass customization operation of its own, but outsourced most of the process to mass customization intermediary Zazzle. Keds Studio is one of the finest examples for the benefits of the new MC infrastructure providers.

In an e-mail, Gregg Poulin, who initiated and implemented the Keds mass customization program as the e-commerce director at Keds, described how this collaboration worked (Gregg has left Keds to become CEO of compete.com). When Keds' management decided to profit from the mass customization trend, Gregg had to face a tough challenge:

"Essentially I had no budget and very little partnership dollars to create a custom shoe program that as you know can cost millions of dollars. In order to complete the vision I needed to be creative and find partners."

While browsing the web looking for a solution, he found my blog and a report on Confego, the company of Brennan Mulligan that later became part of Zazzle:

"One [solution] I found through your writings is Confego. They were the second key to the solution. I had the brand, they had the process/systems. Now I needed the community, which is where zazzle.com fit in."

With this partnership, Keds has beaten Adidas, Nike, Puma, Timberlands and the other large players in the industry with a very elegant solution: It truly is the first 'custom' shoe program that enables people to not only design their own shoes from the ground up but also to sell their own collection to others and make a profit. Gregg told me:

"Within 48 hours, there have been over 18,000 designs published on Zazzle. Can you imagine the dollars it would have taken an internal team to accomplish that feat? No inventory to carry, not guessing on what will sells. At $60 per pair everyone is making margins well above, including the factory!"

The configurator is executed well and has all the elements of a good mass customization configurator. It also features functionalities like sharing designs, getting inspirations, using templates, saving designs, etc. which are part of the Zazzle online experience. For Zazzle, Keds also is a large win as they now could add an entire new category to their assortment of customizable products. For Keds, mass customization is just seen as a continuity of what consumers used to be by their own:

"Since the launch of the Champion in 1916, consumers have been enhancing their Keds with their own personal style using markers, paints, pens and other creative tools," G. Ribatt, president and chief executive officer of The Stride Rite Corporation, Keds' parent company, is quoted in a press release.

"This growing form of expression was the inspiration for Keds Studio. Through our relationship with Zazzle, we can now offer Keds customers the opportunity to bring an uninhibited range of design options and a more professional design aesthetic to this classic shoe."

Keds Studio and its cooperation with Zazzle is a great case of what you can achieve in mass customization with creativity and little money by using the existing infrastructure of mass customization enablers. And, by the way, Zazzle does not care whether you are Keds or just an average consumer: They may not launch an entire new product line for you, but like every consumer, you can turn your creative ideas and market opportunities in your own offering (Spreadshirt or Cafepress are offering similar services).

Update Aug 13, 2008: In a mail from Zazzle, they told me that one week after the launch, more than 30,000 user-generated designs for custom shoes were created in the community.

Jeff Beaver, co-founder and chief product officer of Zazzle, reports:

“We have an incredibly diverse and talented community of designers, and had high hopes that the opportunity to create custom shoes would get them excited. We’ve simply been blown away by the response, both the volume and variety of user-generated designs have exceeded our expectations. 

Some of the most popular themes include art, music, animals and politics, but you can already find pretty much anything.  Developers are also taking advantage of the platform – within 48 hours after launch, one blogger created a Google Maps mashup so that you can get a map or satellite photo of your hometown on your new kicks.” 

RYZwear.com: Applying the Threadless Concept to Footwear

"At RYZ we’ve set out to create a people’s brand – a community of designers, sneakerheads and anyone that cares enough about art, fashion or sneakers to speak up. Together we’ll create sneakers that are designed and chosen, not by some big, faceless corporation, but by you.

Think of RYZ as a stage for designers to showcase their creativity and a forum for people to define what great sneaker design means. In other words, we just make comfortable sneakers – the rest is up to you."

This is how Rob Langstaff announced his new business just one month ago, ryzwear.com The hope of RYZ is to become the Threadless of footwear, connecting people who design custom sneakers with those that vote on the designs and purchase. I am wondering since long what could be good fields where the extremely profitable Threadless idea can be applied to, and footwear could be one option.

Rob Langstaff is not an outsider of the sneaker world. The former Adidas America Inc. president has turned the business model of its former employer upside down, Instead of assigning design jobs to inhouse designers, he is relying on online clusters of consumers to design products and figure out which ones to sell. "In Ryz's case, it's MySpace meets "American Idol," with footwear as the unit of expression", as an online report called the business model.

"The corporate design team is limited by its walls," Langstaff is quoted in the news report, "The corporation shouldn't be dictating what the consumer wears. The consumers should."

This is how RYZ works:

• Each month, Ryz will post a different standardized shoe silhouette on its Web site (a high-top shoe and a low-top shoe were the first two). Users can download the template and, using Adobe Photoshop, illustrate or add images across the shoe.
  
  
• Site visitors can rate and comment on submissions. After a month, a winner will be declared and Ryz will order a run of the winning design -- 100 pairs to start and 1,000 pairs by next year -- from a contract manufacturer in China.
  
  
• The winning designer will get $1000 for the start, plus royalties of $1/piece on ongoing sales, and get their profiles attached to each pair and a listing in Ryzwear.com's Hall of Fame.
  
  
• Two weeks after the contest ends, Ryz will sell the winning shoes on the Web and, for now, in Xebio Co., a leading Japanese sporting-goods retailer that owns a stake in Ryz. The retail price: $75 to $90 a pair.

By 2012, Langstaff hopes to allow users to design the entire shoe, from the shape of the sole to the shape of the eyestay. He also hopes to get into athletic wear. He expects to rely on customers to do most of his marketing.

Rob Langstaff is putting $4 million into his shoe startup, saying there is too great a disconnect between businesses and consumers. He expects to do $40 million in revenue by 2012 (which would be about half the time of Threadless' way to scale, but could work given his larger experience in the market and the higher price tags).

Interestingly, among some of the people helping Langstaff to set to the business is Mikal Peveto, a former footwear executive who started design-your-own shoe site Customatix in 2000. In case you have followed mass customization since its beginning, you should know Customatix. The company got much attention and had one of the best online configurators of its time. But it also did offer too much of a good thing, giving users really zillions of choices at a time when consumers were not really educated in mass customization configurators.

But Peveto believes Ryzwear can succeed where Customatix failed because consumers today are more comfortable interacting and purchasing online from less-established companies.  "Our timing wasn't great. We couldn't get people to buy because they didn't trust the brand," Peveto said. "Now is a completely different time than in 2000 because there are so many different brands that are valid."

So I am curious to see whether Mikal Peveto and Rob Langstaff's predictions come true. They took some serious modifications of adopting the Threadless models for their industry. But Threadless' customers are as much purchasing the membership in a club, a community, by purchasing t-shirts frequently at $15 a pop. I am not quite sure that this will work with $90 sneakers.

To develop however a great (and profitable) underground line of sneakers with a great story, their approach may work will. They may want to learn from Muji, the Japanese's retailer, and its approach to the model. Muji is not just letting customers vote on new designs, but also asks them to make a small cash payment on the item they really want to have in stores. Thus, they can much better predict what
people will purchase later. Such an approach also could benefit RYZ as it would connect the voting process closer with purchasing..

Context information:

A good article in Oregonlive told me first about RYZ

A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle on crowdsourcing and user idea competitions is featuring RYZ, Threadless, and a number of other companies.

My previous reports about the CEC User Co-Design Competitionand Open Source Footwear.

Threadless - the full story: Inc. Magazine Feature on Threadless

Max Chafkin, a staff writer the US Entrepreneurship journal Inc. Magazine, has written a great report on Threadless  for the June 2008 issue of the magazine. It is available in a free online pre-press version now.

Max tells the entire story of Threadless, starting with the episode of a meeting at MIT where the Threadless guys gave one of their first public presentations. I had the privilege to be part of this meeting, and it is fun to read about it in paper (especially as I am at MIT in the moment, writing these lines from the same building where we had the initial meeting with Threadless).

Max did a great job in documenting the history and genesis of Threadless, but also reflecting on its future. Here are some quotes of Max' analysis of the case, but head to the website to read the entire article:

On Threadless' Size and Development

This rapid engagement propelled the company through four years of phenomenal growth, beginning around 2004. The user base grew tenfold, from 70,000 members at the end of 2004 to more than 700,000 today. Sales in 2006 hit $18 million -- with profits of roughly $6 million. In 2007, growth continued at more than 200 percent, with similar margins. Though Nickell refuses to disclose the exact revenue number -- perhaps because he now counts Insight Venture Partners, a New York venture capital firm, as a minority shareholder -- it seems fair to assume that Threadless sold more than $30 million in T-shirts last year.

Ask Nickell what he makes of his company's whirlwind success, and he will respond rather sheepishly. "I think of it as common sense," he says. "Why wouldn't you want to make the products that people want you to make?" Indeed, the idea that the users of products are often best equipped to innovate is something many entrepreneurs know intuitively.

And it is supported by a growing body of research. A study published last year in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal suggested that the vast majority of companies are founded by "user-entrepreneurs" -- people who went into business to improve a product they used. Meanwhile, studies by von Hippel and others show that in industries as diverse as scientific instruments and snowboard equipment, more than half the innovations generally come from users, not from research labs.

On user innovation and the resistance of traditional companies to adopt it

Some companies actually punish these people by cracking down on unauthorized innovations. Apple has famously "bricked" -- that is, electronically disabled -- iPhones that have been enhanced by their owners. Other companies pay lip service to user innovation but have trouble following through on the concept. "Companies are very good at creating platforms for external input, but they're very bad at using this input," says Frank Piller …

Threadless is an exception to this. "You could say that what Threadless does is trivial, but it's not," says Harvard's Lakhani. In fact, the very triviality of Threadless's product -- something as low tech and as commoditized as a T-shirt -- proves that vibrant online communities can drive all sorts of nontechnical businesses. This should be encouraging news to entrepreneurs. Customer communities have become exceedingly inexpensive to build and manage; blogging software and social network platforms, for example, are now available for free from a handful of start-ups. "We thought that open source could only work in software, and now it's being successfully applied to a product as mundane as a T-shirt," Lakhani says.

On Threadless' Corporate Culture and Work Style

[Today], the company is suspiciously companylike. The go-carts generally stay parked, the buck stays mute, and the Ping-Pong table serves as a gathering place for impromptu meetings. "When I started, we spent half the day playing," says Lance Curran, a bearded 29-year-old wearing a beanie, jeans, and a flannel shirt. "That doesn't happen anymore." This is not to say Curran doesn't like his job. On the contrary, he nearly glows when he talks about his rise from a temporary warehouse worker in 2005 to the warehouse manager in charge of a staff of 18 today. ...

Like Curran, most of Threadless's employees come with no obvious qualifications for their jobs. The oldest staff member is 33, and many are under 25. The employees do, however, arrive with a deep and abiding love of Threadless, having joined the community long before they entered the work force.

Joe Van Wetering, a 21-year-old illustrator who works in the production department, was a frequent visitor to Threadless's offices as a teenager before taking a job in the warehouse in 2006. Ross Zietz had won seven competitions while studying art at Louisiana State University before he took a job as the company's janitor in 2004. He has since been promoted to art director, charged with helping the winning designers get their entries ready for printing. In fact, 75 percent of the company's 50 employees were community members before they were hired.

On other product categories Threadless is exploring

Now, Nickell is set to let his club loose on other businesses. In addition to expanding to children's clothing and retail, Threadless will begin selling prints and posters online. And later this year, the company will add a range of products, including handbags, wallets, and dinnerware, under the brand Naked & Angry. Each item will be adorned with patterns submitted by users, with a new product launched each month. "I think Naked & Angry, if handled properly, has the potential to be way bigger than Threadless, because we have the flexibility to do everything," says Kalmikoff, who envisions moving into high-end clothing as well as housewares. Jeff Lieberman, managing director of Insight Venture Partners and a board member, is even more bullish. "To say it's just a T-shirt company is absurd," he says. "I look at it as a community company that happens to use T-shirts as a canvas."

 
And Max' final evaluation of Threadless' Business Model: A fundamental economic shift

The way Eric von Hippel sees it, Threadless has tapped into a fundamental economic shift, a movement away from passive consumerism. One day in the not-too-distant future, he says, citizen inventors using computer design programs and three-dimensional printers will exchange physical prototypes in much the same way Nickell and cohorts played Photoshop tennis.

Eventually, Threadless-like communities could form around industries as diverse as semiconductors, auto parts, and toys. "Threadless is one of the first firms to systematically mine a community for designs, but everything is moving in this direction," says von Hippel. He foresees research labs and product-design divisions at manufacturing companies being outstripped by an "innovation commons" made up of tinkerers, hackers, and other devout customers freely sharing their ideas. The companies that win will be the ones that listen.

This may or may not come to pass, but the lesson of Threadless is more basic. Its success demonstrates what happens when you allow your company to become what your customers want it to be, when you make something as basic and quaint as "trust" a core competency. Threadless succeeds by asking more than any modern retail company has ever asked of its customers -- to design the products, to serve as the sales force, to become the employees. Nickell has pioneered a new kind of innovation. It doesn't require huge research budgets or creative brilliance -- just a willingness to keep looking outward.

Context:
- My earlier reports on Threadless are here and here.
- The full Inc. Magazin article

Spreadshirt Reveals New Crowdsourced Logo

Remember the Spreadshirt Crowdsourcing contest to get a new logo from its community, the Open Logo Project 1.6 (OLP) ? I was part of the judging panel, and it was a fun activity to do. "We wanted to take this to the community who use, create and live our product, rather than to an agency", Jana Eggers, Spreadshirt CEO, is quoted in a press release.

The results were in at the end of the year, and now finally the winning logo has been placed on the site and all CI materials. Kim Larsen’s ‘Love Tab’ was the winning design, chosen from 2,800 submissions (from 45 countries). Kim is a 23 year old graphic and interactive media designer from Sweden.

"I wanted to make personal branding visually simple and to embed a symbol everyone can relate to.", he says, "The heart resonates with the feeling of love you have for something you’ve created and the stitching with the hand-crafted nature of the product."

Context:
- My previous report about the contest.
- The official contest site
- Press release at Spreadshirt (and I do not know whether being a web 2.0 guru is a good thing or not today).

Ultimate Customization: Design and Deliver - a new project that examines the next era of mass customization

A guest article by Daniel Eyers from the Cardiff University Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre (CUIMRC). CUIMRC is a new center at Cardiff University in the UK. In this post, Daniel describes about the mission and research at this center.

Imagine the opportunities that exist when the freedom of design opportunities afforded by Mass Customisation can be realised using innovative Rapid Manufacturing technologies, where one-off custom manufacturing is the norm, not the exception. As these technologies mature and become increasingly accessible to end-users, will this enablement of Mass Customisation be achievable? If so, what will be the effects of customised demand for business when compared to traditional Mass Production?

Cardiff University Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre (CUIMRC), funded by the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council, is the UK’s leading research centre in the field of sustainable manufacturing R&D. Ultimate Customisation: Design & Deliver is a new project that examines the concept of Ultimate Customisation, the next era of Mass Customisation. Ultimate Customisation will involve much greater personalisation, where customers actively take part as co-designers and thus contribute to the value creation. The project aims to understand the viability of Ultimate Customisation using advanced manufacturing technologies such as those associated with Rapid Manufacturing. In this project we explore the possible implications of Rapid Manufacturing within a consumer facing environment, challenging traditional mass customisation production economics and disrupting existing commercial logistics, distribution and marketing paradigms.

Our previous consideration for Mass Customisation of logistics (through the McCLOSM study) demonstrated the implications for businesses in customising both logistics and manufacturing, and now that this project approaches its conclusion, the Ultimate Customisation: Design & Deliver project will continue to examine the implications of Rapid Manufacturing technology.

Considering the current status of knowledge, we have found that extensive literature exists for Mass Customisation, and separately, Rapid Manufacturing. However, as a result of rising individualism of consumer demand together with the technological improvement of Rapid Manufacturing, we believe these concepts will increasingly be implemented together in the short term. Despite numerous companies actively engaged in this field, as yet the body of knowledge analysing the overall topic has as yet received little research attention.

As a research centre, CUIMRC aims to help industry through creating greater understanding of the complex interrelationship between economics and environmental and social factors in developing a truly sustainable business. Our approach to research is to actively engage closely with our research partners and their associated supply chains in order to get an impartial, first hand viewpoint of their particular situation, while also allowing us to maximise the relevance and usefulness of our research outputs. Industrial secondments in which our researchers spend time embedded within host organisations have proven an extremely useful mechanism in this respect. We engage with stakeholders on several other levels, ranging from their participation in surveys and focus groups through to collaborative partnerships on individual projects and strategic input to the consortium through representation on our Steering Group.

The Ultimate Customisation project involves a number of collaborative industrial partners embarking on Rapid Manufacturing-Enabled Mass Customised production and through case studies and modelling approaches, we are exploring both demand and supply management implications arising from Mass Customisation. For the organisations involved in the project, our research aims to provide a clear understanding of both their present and prospective supply chains through ‘what-if’ simulations of futuristic business models for Ultimate Customisation. Additionally, from these assessments we can also assist in the optimisation of processes to directly benefit their business. The collaborative partners represent a cross section of industry, including highly experienced designers and manufacturers with capabilities both for rapid manufacture of customised products and traditional mass production.

During our research we anticipate making a number of Ultimate Customisation publications based on our research findings, many of which will be linked to our industrial collaboration. A warm invitation is extended to any individuals or organisations wishing to become involved with the research or receive project updates/dissemination information to register their interest with us.

Contact for more information Daniel Eyers (eyersDR@cf.ac.uk) or Hartanto Wong (wongH@cf.ac.uk).

New Blog on Mass Customization and Rapid Ranufacturing and how this will influence the design profession

We dont do retro is the personal blog of Matt Sinclair, a designer based in Helsinki. I first met Matt on the MCPC 2007 conference and then again last week on a workshop in Helsinki, and he does REALLY interesting work on user co-design.

His blog mainly concerned with mass customization and rapid manufacturing, which are the areas he researching for his PhD at Loughborough University in the UK. But you’ll also find information about other subjects that interest him - lead user innovation, open source design and industrial design in general (Matt also wrote one of the most extensive MCPC 2007 reviews)!

His Ph.D. is titled "An investigation of the feasibility of product architectures to facilitate consumer-created designs in the consumer electronics industry, using rapid manufacturing technologies as an enabler"

While he expects not to be ready before Summer 2010, his early thoughts already are quite interesting:

"Rapid Manufacturing (RM) is defined as the direct production of finished parts or products, most often utilising one of a number of 3D printing technologies. ... The most important difference between rapid manufacturing technologies and traditional mass manufacturing technologies such as injection moulding is the absence of tooling. This has a number of important implications. One of the common features of mass manufacturing processes is that the means of production require substantial initial investment, however once in place the cost of manufacturing a single part or product (relative to the initial investment) is negligible. It is therefore a basic principle of mass manufacturing that as the number of parts produced increases, the cost of production of each individual part decreases. This inevitably leads to uniformity, since even small design changes require significant reinvestment in tooling.
...

Mass customisation offers the possibility of designing for niche markets, in small production runs, but it will be impossible for a designer, or even a design team, to be an expert in all these niches. Designers will therefore need to accept the necessity of inviting consumers to take part in the design process, even to design their own products. Furthermore, rapid manufacturing reduces the level of technological expertise required to design functioning parts. It is therefore likely that consumers will begin to design and produce their own products whether officially sanctioned by a brand or not.

The purpose of the traditional design process is not just to impose a uniform aesthetic however, it also refines and rejects on the basis of ergonomics, durability, integration with other products and systems, cost etc. These are all areas in which the designer’s expertise is the best tool to resolve the conflicting demands of a product brief. To make sense of the potential for multiple product variants which mass customisation offers, my hypothesis is therefore that the task of the industrial designer will in future be to create modular product architectures which define and limit the parameters of any possible design."

Go to Matt's blog here: We dont do retro

Un-Readymades: From Object to Experience. A study of mass customization from the perspective of industrial design

Interview with Martin Konrad Gloeckle, NYC, on consumer co-design and his series of "un-readymade" designs, a great interpretation of the customization trend

When I saw these pictures, I was fascinated immediately ... Martin Konrad Gloeckle, an Industrial Designer currently based in New York City, created some wonderful designs that are one of the best interpretations of the customization trend I ever saw. His designs are part of a study where he discusses the customization trend from the perspective of industrial design.

Born and raised in Germany, Martin relocated to the US in 1996, and recently finished his Master’s Degree in Industrial Design at the Pratt Institute in New York. Martin has additional degrees in Computer Science and Business Administration, and before returning to school had a successful career working for leading web and interactive advertising agencies both in Germany and the US. Martin’s design work has been featured in exhibitions, design blogs and magazines including New York Magazine, his award-winning Bendino lamp is currently produced and distributed in Europe.

Martin is the author of "Un-Readymades: From object to experience" – a study of mass customization from the perspective of industrial design. In this work, Martin has analyzed how consumers are moving away from being passive consumers to actively influencing and shaping their world. Parallel to this, consumers are increasingly looking for improved experiences, involvement, and personal expression. In return, user-generated content or the Do-It-Yourself movement are booming.

But how should product design react on this? Martin finds that up to today, most designers have not reacted on this trend and still are just focusing on providing ready-made, fixed and stable products. He also finds that conventional mass customization systems still do not provide a full user experience or often require advanced knowledge or tools.

In his study, he explores the next levels in this field. Based on research and design explorations, it proposes a framework for product design that engages the user and allows for deeper experience and involvement. It provokes a rethinking of the products we use and interact with on a daily basis, and presents several designs based on this.

In a recent interview, we spoke about his work and how he developed his design.

Martin, what is the key element of the design framework you propose to engage consumers deeper into experiences?

Well, the proposed framework actually has six major principles. However, these are based on two key points: A) Create design opportunities for the user, and B) Use a low-tech approach.

Let me start with the first point: What we can observe today in the online or two-dimensional world are increasingly active, involved, and creative consumers. This includes things like the so-called ‘user generated content’ of blogs, YouTube, Wikipedia and so on, as well as the whole field of desktop publishing, desktop video, desktop music etc. However, when it comes to the world of three-dimensional products, there is very little happening at this point. There are simply very limited opportunities available to the consumer.
The series of products I created tries to address this. Called ‘Un-readymades’ to express the involvement of the end-users, they provide consumers with opportunities to design, create, and express themselves.

Of course, there are other developments related to this trend. Things like the many online customization tools, the fabber and prototyping tools, and the increasingly available D.I.Y. services like Ponoko or Buglags to name a few. These however generally are very technology driven. And this is where the second point comes in. Technology has opened many areas to the average consumer. But at the same time there still often is the need for certain knowledge and tools, be it of hard- or software. Therefore, this is not accessible to everyone. In addition, the user is physically removed from these products during the design process. Rarely is there any direct interaction between the product and consumer. By using a rather low-tech approach, I am trying to address some of these issues.

Browsing over your web site, I was fascinated by the originality of your designs that incorporate your ideas. Can you illustrate your framework with one of your own designs?

One of my goals was to create a multitude of designs, to explore different areas and address different users as well as to show the flexibility of the framework. To pick one piece out, the ‘drawn’ vase is probably a good example. It is essentially a combination of a dry-erase board with an opening for a flower and a water container mounted behind it. You can use it on the wall or on the table. What the dry-erase board does is to allow the user to redesign its surface and thereby the vase.

So lets go through the six framework principles:

Enable user involvement: The vase is somewhere between an off-the-shelf product and a D.I.Y. project. While it provides the users with a starting point in form of the vase functionality, it allows them add to this.

Make it interactive: By drawing on the dry-erase board, the user directly and physically interacts with the vase, and thereby develops a closer relationship with it.

Provide room for play: While the vase offers a starting point in terms of functionaly, it otherwise literally provides an empty canvas. Not everything is predetermined, but is left open for playful exploration. Watching people creating all different kinds of designs with this was definitely one of the highlights of this project for me.

Keep it simple: I wanted these pieces to be approachable for everyone, meaning not requiring any extensive tools or knowledge. Everyone knows how to hold a pencil, so everyone can use this product. Of course, people‘s drawing skills differ, but that is were the erasable and forgiving nature of the dry-erase board comes in.

Make it personal: As the vase provides for more than just pick&choose within a predetermined selection, it really allows people to create very personal and unique pieces. No vase will ever look the same as any other.

Small Steps: The piece doesn’t require anybody to suddenly draw like an artist. Rather, the user can start with a very simple drawing. But as his confidence and capabilities grow, so can his created product.

What is the role of companies in your concept? What would you recommend a manager that wants to place your ideas into practice?

In terms of manufacturing, the beauty of these designs is that they do not require any major changes in the manufacturing infrastructure as is usually associated with mass customization. As the customization happens at the end user and not in the factory, the company still only needs to create one fixed product.

In terms of management, it probably more comes down to being open-minded and believing in the creativity of end-users. Basically giving the consumer more credit than most companies currently do.

At the same time, we of course need to realize that while customization is a major trend, it is still to be seen how much of the mainstream it will become. While especially Generations X and Y are increasingly interested in self-expression and involvement, the majority of consumers still prefers buying non-customizable products and maybe express themselves solely through selected purchases.

What did originally motivate your research? How did you choose this topic?

As I was researching potential thesis topics, certain personal interests of mine came up repeatedly. These are areas that I have always been fascinated by, like peoples desire to express themselves, peoples urge to create, the growing D.I.Y. movement, and finally new and evolving production methods. At one point, I realized that there might be a way to bring these different areas together, and to use this combination to enable and encourage creativity and self-expression for the consumer. And to simply provide for more joy and fun as part of a product experience.

Why do most industrial designers neglect the customization and self-impression trend? Do design schools educate your designers in these new topics?

First off, there are of course certain products where customization is not applicable, for example for safety reasons. Besides that, a couple of things come to mind.

For one, designing a product that is customizable means giving away some control of the final product. As a designer, you put a lot of time and thought into determining a very particular look, feel, and functionality to create something that addresses a specific need. While most products usually stay as intended when they leave your hands, with customizable pieces you control them only up to a certain degree. This is something not everyone is comfortable with, especially with more visually driven pieces.

In addition, there is also a school of thought with some designers that only they should be the ones ‘designing’. After all, that is what they went to school for and spent a lot of time on, learning how to do it right. According to them, the general consumer does not know about designing, and should not be allowed to do so.

This whole issue of ‘professional’ versus ‘amateur’ designer, across all areas from web over graphic to industrial design, is something we could easily talk about for hours. I personally do not subscribe to this rather elitist thinking, and believe that there is and always will be a place for both. However, and as in every other profession, we designers need to rethink our roles periodically, and adjust to a changing environment.

In terms of design school education, there is obviously an inherent delay of current trends manifesting themselves in the education curriculum. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I believe the value of design school, besides teaching basics like form and color, is rather in teaching creative thinking. This together with providing the appropriate environment for exploration is the starting point. The rest is really up to the individual student, to investigate and explore different areas, and push his own limits as well as that of design in general.

What’s next for you now that you have finished this project?

In terms of the ‘Un-readymades’, I am starting to look into potential options of moving some of them out of the prototype stage and into production. Besides that, as I am done with my Industrial Design degree, I am also currently interviewing for a job. Things are still open though, so I guess I should use this opportunity to invite anybody looking for an Industrial Designer to take a look at my resume and portfolio on my website.

To conclude: What is, in general and beyond your industry, the greatest mass customization offering ever – either one that is already existing or that you would like to get in the future?

Well, this is a pretty grand and open question. Maybe to answer it in a similar open way, I would pick the human mind? It probably does not get much more mass-customized than that. And thinking of it, it actually fits pretty well in my framework. :-)

Contact Martin at martin@martin-konrad.com or http://martin-konrad.com
You can view an illustrated abstract of his work at http://martin-konrad.com/unreadymades

Zapfab: User-generated content meets 3D Printing

A new Ponoko-alike company is coming from Manchester in the UK! Zapfab Ltd is a user manufacturing start up that offers a new way of delivering individualized, customized products. As other companies in this field, they are combining the creativity of user-generated content with the power of 3D Printing (fabbing).

In a press release I got today, the company is described as follows:

"User-generated content is ubiquitous throughout the internet, from weblogs to YouTube videos. Zapfab builds on this trend, by providing a website where users can easily generate unique designs for 3D objects.

3D Printing is rapidly gaining ground as a way of creating real, physical objects from 3D design data. Zapfab provides an easy way to access this technology: Once you have generated a 3D design you can choose to have it 3D printed: Zapfab will 3D print the design and deliver the finished object to you.

The Zapfab website has two main areas: the Design Catalog and the 3D Customizer. The Design Catalog contains all the designs on the site and is a repository like Google's 3D warehouse. The 3D Customizer is where the customizing takes place: Each design can be customized in different ways: color, size, pattern, etc. and the 3D Customizer contains simple controls for each of the options. So, once a user has customized a design, she can save it back into the catalog for other people to see. And then they in turn can customize and build on her design.

“We see three main groups of users for Zapfab.com,” said Julie Wood, Zapfab Director, in the press release “First, we have made the 3D Customizer really easy to use, so that anyone can create a unique, customized design in just a few minutes.

Second, there are a range of users with 3D modelling skills, who will be able to upload their designs to the site; and we aim to make it easy for them to add customizations to those designs.

Third, users with programming or scripting skill will be able to create new, highly-customizable designs. And all the designs, from the simplest to the most complex, are customizable through the same easy-to-use 3D Customizer.”

At the moment, Zapfab’s Design Catalog contains over 100 customized designs, ranging from bowls to boxes and bangles. All of the designs can be 3D printed “as is”, or freely customized. It is a nice, but at this stage not too creative collection of things. But I hope to see much more activity on their side, and given that they are located in Europe, I also will try this service by myself in the next weeks and let you know about my experiences.

Mass Customization in the Construction Industry: Industry Tour Visits Custom Home Manufacturers in Japan

This sounds like the best of all worlds: "Zero-Energy" and "mass customization" in one home. I met Dr Masa Noguchi, a scholar at the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art on the MCPC 2007 conference, where he was presenting at in the "Mass Customization & Architecture" track.

Masa is doing plenty of research on mass customization of homes, and coming from Japan, he has access to the manufacturers of the leading nation when it comes to the industrial fabrication of highly customized homes (pre fabs 2.0).

His institute is offering a unique field trip ("the mission") to see mass customization in this industry in practice during the

PV ZERO-ENERGY MASS CUSTOM HOME MISSION TO JAPAN 2007, 10-12 September, 2008.

From the announcement:

"The PV Zero-Energy Mass Custom Home Mission to Japan 2008 is aimed at offering industry professionals, academics and government officers opportunities to visit not only the state-of-the-art production facilities of five leading housing manufacturers in Japan, but also the sales center where a number of model homes are displayed allowing potential home buyers to examine the quality.

The mission also extends its visit to an existing solar community that consists of 100 prefabricated homes that are usually equipped with solar photo voltaic power generating systems. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese housing manufacturers focused solely on the mass production of their products, resulting in a supply of virtually identical, rather monotonous houses.

Due to the inferior image associated with the low-quality appearance of these mass produced houses, the public immediately rejected industrialized homes. Since then, the manufacturers have placed greater emphasis on improving housing quality, and thereby customer satisfaction, such that Japanese housing manufacturers today enjoy a reputation for providing reasonably-priced quality housing that, while still mass-produced, is customized—i.e. mass customization.

Japanese housing manufacturers are successful in commercializing their industrialized houses that are often equipped with a PV system, as a standard feature rather than options. In fact, between 1994 and 2003, the number of domestic PV installations in Japan drastically increased from 539 to 52,863 houses. Although the country has been experiencing the negative fluctuation of housing starts over the last few years, the PV housing manufacturers express their confidence in the increase of their sales for years to come.

The mission corresponds with the global market needs and demands for housing of today and tomorrow and helps the participants gain the knowledge of contemporary housing technologies being implemented for the commercialization of marketable and reproducible zero-energy houses.

For more information, please look in this PDF file with more information, or contact Dr Masa Noguchi, Mission Coordinator, at m.noguchi@gsa.ac.uk. Or go here for more information: http://www.masscustomhome.com.

Ponoko: Design Contest and Latest Press on User Manufacturing Enabler Ponoko

Ponoko (see earlier report) gave one of the favorite presentations at the MCPC 2007 in Boston. The company is a perfect example of user manufacturing. Nic from Ponoko just informed me about their 10-day design challenge series, running from today until March 10. Each day, they ask for designs within a special category.

Being a small company, prices are not that big, but it will be lots of fun and it seems to be an easy way to test Ponoko. The Ponoko crew also can fill its assortment of user design with this project -- and thus, even if you do not win, chances are that other people like your design and you can sell it though their on-demand manufacturing system. The winner gets $1,000. 10 get $300. 25 get their designs made for free ...

For more details on the contest, go here.

Ponoko also got plenty of press in the last weeks, here is a review:

The New York Times – Tinkering at Home, Selling on the Web

The Economist – Bespoke Manufacturing – I made it my way

BBC News – The shape of things to come

Wired – (multiple articles)

MIT Technology Review – Automated Custom Manufacturing

TechCrunch – (multiple articles)

Engadget – Ponoko now live to make, market your gizmo

TrendWatching – 8 important consumer trends for 2008

Treehugger – (multiple articles)

Virtual Fashion Technology: New blog covers major pesonalization technology

Recently I learned about a great new blog published by Elaine Polvinen, a professor of Fashion Textile Technology at Buffalo State College in Buffalo, New York. Elanie writes about "Virtual Fashion Technologies", a main enabler of mass customization and personalization in the fashion industry.

She wants to document with her blog the transition and expansion from traditional 2D designs to 2D Digital to 3D virtual for apparel textile product design, development and retailing.

Here is a selection of her recent posts:

# Transformational Avatar Retailing: The Missing Link For Mass Customization?

# A Conversation with Louise Guay from My Virtual Model

# Avatars in Second Life for Retail Marketing? It’s Not Only Coming – it’s Here! - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3.

# Highlights of MCPC 2007 in Montréal, Canada: Part 1 - Part 2

And much more at http://fashiontech.wordpress.com

User Manufacturing Trendwatching Report

Trendwatching, a large trend research network, has recently published its annual briefing on the main trends for 2008. Among them is my favorite new topic, user manufacturing (other terms for the same idea are desktop manufacturing, manufacturing as a service, fabbing, ...). Named "MIY – Make it Myself" the Trendwatching crew is naming user manufacturing as the next big thing in user-created content.

"[user generated content]" is a mainstream trend now, one that keeps giving, with millions of consumers uploading their creative endeavors online, and tens of millions of others enjoying the fruits of their creativity. User-generated content, at least in the online world, has grown from a teenage hobby to an almost equal contender to established entities in news, media, entertainment and craft."

These consumers expect to be able to create anything they want as long as it is digital, and to customize and personalize many physical goods with traditional mass customization offerings. The next step in this evolution will be their desire to transfer digitally designed products into real physical goods as well.

Trendwatching is expecting that "MIY | MAKE IT YOURSELF (and then SIY | SELL IT YOURSELF) becomes increasingly sophisticated in the next 12 months".

As references, they refer to old friends which have been covered in this blog before:

# New Zealand-based Ponoko (which works like a Zazzle for 3D objects, see my original article on them here)

# Fab Lab Bcn (Barcelona) is part of the worldwide network of Fab Labs, an initiative of MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, and provides a laser-cutter, water jet, 3D printer, mini-mill and other machines for participants to use. One of Fab Lab's initiators is Neil Gershenfeld, professor at MIT and author of FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop.

# The Desktop Factory 3D printer, with a list price of USD 4,995, uses an inexpensive halogen light source and drum printing technology to build robust parts from composite plastic powder, layer by layer. Desktop Factory envisages that within three years, Desktop Factory's 3D printers will be affordable for home use.

# They also mention the Swedish design group FRONT and their Sketch Furniture project. This trio materializes freehand sketches of furniture into real options. Very nice, very expensive with a chair starting at USD 10,500 per piece.

The last section of their trend report is very important to read, something that I always mention in my presentations on the limitations of user manufacturing:

"Now, we're not saying every consumer is going to design and manufacture his or her own furniture or appliances. Rather, MIY is yet another piece of the participation puzzle: enabling those consumers who feel like it to call the shots, bypassing traditional players. In future briefings we’ll address the implications of what this choice – being able to consume ready-made or create their own versions of anything and everything – will mean for the behavior and expectations of younger generations."

Context:
- The orginal Trendwatching report

- My original report about user manufacturing and my definition of this idea

- My earlier report about Ponoko (more here).

- My earlier report about the low cost 3D printers

- If you can read German, Jochen Krisch had many excellent postings on user manufacturing in the last months, a very good staring point is his recent listing of all 3D printing services on the web.

- A very good starting point also is press reports of Z-Printer, a manufacturer of 3D printers used to make custom objects.

Webinar: The Next Gen of Mass Customization: User Manufacturing, Instant Companies, and Customer Co-Creation (Nov 29, 2007 on your desktop)

How a new infrastructure is enabling consumers to become instant manufacturers – and your future competitor -- 10% discount for MC&OI Blog readers

I am coming back to your desktop. After the large success of an earlier webinar on mass customization, London based Pure Inisghts is organizing a second webinar on the theme, this time around my new favorite topic of user manufacturing.

The topic: We are used to have a networked laser printer on every desk in our office and in every home, enabling us to print documents on the spot which a few decades ago demanded a specialized manufacturer. The same may be happening with the production of many other goods. Today new production technologies ("fabbing") and advanced design software allow average users to produce almost everything – on their own desk. Welcome to the factory in your kitchen.

This session will discuss the upcoming user manufacturing trend, a development that recently is taking shape in larger scope and scale: User manufacturing refers to a public available software, manufacturing, and distribution infrastructure that enables creative users and customers to design, build, and sell own creations to a larger public – without the traditional investments in setting up a business. User manufacturing supplements – or substitutes – mass customization strategies which many companies have implemented. It also may become the most efficient strategy to serve the long tail of variants in many industries.

Consider Spreadshirt, one of the world's largest producers of graphic t-shirts. This company just allows everyone to create an own assortment of designs, and then sell this assortments in highly targeted retail outlets, online and offline, to a small market segment the user knows best. Thus, Spreadshirt does not have to predict the long tail of heterogeneity of fashion products, but just focuses on allowing users to create and sell this assortment by their own.

User manufacturing is enabled by three main technologies: (1) Easy-to-operate design software that allows users to transfer their ideas into a design. (2) Design repositories where users upload, search, and share designs with other users. This allows a community of loosely connected users to develop a large range of applications. (3) Easy-to-access flexible manufacturing technology. New rapid manufacturing technologies ("fabbing") finally deliver the dream of translating any 3-D data files into physical products -- even in you living room. Combining this technology with recent web technologies can open a radical new way to provide custom products along the entire "long tail" of demand.

User manufacturing builds on the notion that users are not just able to configure a good within the given solution space (mass customization), but also to develop such a solution space by their own and utilize it by producing custom products. As a result, customers are becoming not only co-designers, but also manufacturers, using an infrastructure provided by some specialized companies.

The webinar will discuss recent trends and case examples of the user manufacturing trend. We also will compare the business models of companies which are building on the user manufacturing trend and which implement and operate the underlying infrastructure ´for creative users to become manufacturers.

Planned session outline:

- A short review of conventional mass customization thinking

- Which recent trends and developments enhance these strategies and how mass customization is related to “The Long Tail” phenomena

- What is user manufacturing, and which trends does this strategy support?

- What are the components of an infrastructure that supports user manufacturing?

- A review of business models of established companies and recent startups which already successfully benefit from the opportunities of user manufacturing

- A discussion of the major challenges and open issues in this domain

- Session wrap-up: Idea for further action

To register, please go to http://www.pure-insight.com/webinars/mass-customization-next-generation and use promotional code aix (case sensitive!) wenn registering for a 10% discount.

Note: You also can download the webinar after its initial live broadcast – but only when joining live, you can interact and ask direct questions.

All further information can be found here.

Context information

- If you prefer to see the content of this webinar in action, a seminar on Fabbing and User generated Manufacturing in Essen, Germany, provides a great opportunity on Nov 22.

- My earlier posts on user manufacturing

- Article in CNN online on the fabbing trend

- Article in New Scientist on the fabbing trend

- Article in Make magazine on how to use a fabbing device

Rethinking Business: Products of tomorrow: Fabbing, personalization & custom manufacturing (Essen, 22. Nov 2007)

A VERY interesting focused event on the new world of fabbing, laser sintering, user manufacturing, and how to make business with this will take place in Essen (Germany) on Nov 22 afternoon & evening. Hosted by Z-Punkt, an innovative trend consultancy, and taking place in the Zeche Zollverein, a spectacular industrial location, the conference promised to become a real eye-opener and point of discussion.

For more information on the theme, have a look on this previous blog post: I will host a webinar on the same topic of user manufacturing on Nov 29 in case you cannot travel to Essen, Germany, for this event.

For a list of all speakers and the detailed program, please download the event flyer.

The event will be in German language, so all the following announcements are in German language as well.

Erfahren Sie, wie neue Materialien zu Innovationstreibern werden und warum der 3D-Druck das Business revolutioniert. Die Konferenz "Rethinking Business #02. Produkte von morgen" findet am 22. November 2007 auf der Zeche Zollverein in Essen statt. Themenschwerpunkte: Neue Materialien und individuelle Produktion.

Und noch mehr Informationen zum Thema finden Sie in einen Interview mit Frank Piller auf dem Z-Punkt-Blog.

Drucken wir in ein paar Jahren unser Geschirr jeden Tag frisch aus unserem persönlichen 3D-Drucker aus? Und werden die Fallschirme der Zukunft aus Nano-Spinnfäden gefertigt? Wie neue Materialien die Produktwelt von morgen prägen und welches Innovationspotenzial in einer individualisierten Produktionsweise steckt – das diskutiert Z_punkt im Rahmen der Konferenz „Produkte von morgen“ am 22. November 2007 in der Zollverein School of Management and Design in Essen.

Die zweite Veranstaltung im Rahmen des Konferenzzyklus „Rethinking Business“ setzt den Fokus auf „Neue Materialien und Individuelle Produktion“ – und schlägt dabei die Brücke von der Vision zur Praxis. Der nach dem Open-Source-Modell „fab@home“ für 2.000,- Euro gebaute Prototyp eines einfachen 3D-Druckers geht während der Konferenz live in Produktion und vermittelt den Teilnehmern einen Eindruck von den zukünftigen Möglichkeiten einer Fabrik im Taschenformat: Mit einem für Endkunden erschwinglichen 3D-Printer könnte das Ausdrucken von Alltagsprodukten nämlich bald flächendeckend zu Hause möglich sein.

„Uns beschäftigt im Rahmen der Rethinking-Business-Reihe die Frage, wie die Wirtschaft der Zukunft funktioniert. Dieses Mal interessieren wir uns für die Produktwelt. Wir fragen: Wie sehen die Produkte der Zukunft aus? Wie werden sie entwickelt und hergestellt? Und wie müssen sich Unternehmen aufstellen, um intelligente Materialien und individuelle Produktion als Innovationstreiber zu nutzen“, sagt Andreas Neef, geschäftsführender Gesellschafter von Z_punkt.

Darauf muss die Wirtschaft vorbereitet sein – wie einst beim Siegeszug des Personal Computers. Dr. Matthias Lüken, Produktentwickler bei Henkel, und Dr. Sigurd Buchholz, Technologieexperte bei der Bayer Technology Services GmbH, berichten aus der Industrieperspektive über Anwendungsmöglichkeiten und Innovationspotenziale einer individualisierten Produktionsweise.

Weitere Infos:
Rethinking Business #02. Produkte von morgen

22 Nov 2007, 16:00 - 21:30 Uhr at Zollverein School of Management & Design, Essen

http://www.rethinkingbusiness.de

Programm-Flyer und Anmeldung online (Studenten können für nur 50 Euro teilnehmen !)

Info: Silke Schneider (schneider@z-punkt.de)

Udate: Crowdlogoing the New Spreadshirt Tagline: New Design Competition Launched -- and finalized

(Update of the original posting from Sept 2007 -- now with the project's final result at the end of this post!).

Hey, you designers of the world. Treat me nice: I am on the panel of the new Spreadshirt Open Logo competition :-). Coined the Open Logo Project (OLP) 1.6, this is the second time that the company has started a crowdsourcing contest for its new logo. Anyone can submit a draft logo for comment and evaluation by an expert panel, other designers and the Spreadshirt community. Each week during the contest, the top entries will win awards and a place in the overall grand final.

The last contest (hosted 1.6 years ago) received over 1000 submissions from more than 600 designers mainly in Germany and France. This time, the entire world shall participate. The contest will run from the 27th August - 14th October. To take part in the contest - with submissions, comments, voting or just lurking - head to http://olp.spreadshirt.net.

Every branding textbook, however, will tell you not to change your logo every two (or even 1.6) years. But “…this is not a publicity stunt," said Jana Eggers, Spreadshirt’s new CEO. "We found a tagline that better represents what we do, and now is the right time to change our current logo to support it".

The new tagline, resulting from working with an international branding firm: "Your own label" shall reflect Spreadshirt's mission to be "the world's creative apparel platform". After deciding on the new tagline, the natural step for Spreadshirt was to turn to its community again for a logo that better supports the new tagline.

The cool thing: Adam Fletcher, who is coordinating the competition at Spreadshirt, even allowed me to pick my own prize. So: I will award a first price for the most innovative design, one, that really demonstrates uniqueness and out of the box thinking. And this price will be truly innovative and unique as well: You can win an entire mass customized outfit. More on the website!

But beyond the innovative prices, also the OLP idea competition itself has some nice features which make it a great example of open innovation and sets it ahead to other design contests on the web:

They have ten different awards and prizes for different categories which also honor not only WHAT, but HOW you design, awarding good competition citizenship. There are prices for community involvement, memorability, branding excellence, etc …

This also allows Spreadshirt to think of those that offer input but can't design (I would be a perfect candidate for this). Anyone who actively contributes to the OLP community by ratings, commenting, offering feedback, starting discussions etc can win one of every shirt that Spreadshirt’s “La Fraise” prints for the next year (should be around 100 shirts – so if you win, buy a new closet).

"We [want] to recognize out-of-the-box thinking, collaboration, community favorites and more," adds Adam Fletcher. "Even if you're not the winning designer, you can scoop a number of other prizes, or just waste a lot of your time, learn a lot from looking at the work of the other designers."

For real winning designers, they also provide more than cash, but help with the most valuable good for artists, recognition. Along with a MacBook pro and €3,000 cash, the winner will be featured with a photo and an interview in he “Computer Arts” magazine, an interview on “Computerlove” and a permanent “thank-you-page” at Spreadshirt.com

So, now get your creative fluids working … and submit a nice logo so that I have something to judge next week !!

------------

UPDATE: The project is over -- and it was an interesting experience for me to be on the panel of such an open innovation competition. Here some observations:

First: The winner: While Spreadshirt selected two first prices for their new logo (see the designs here) and is now working with the community on improving the designs. My personal short list looked a bit different, see it here.

Second: My winner: As written above, I could award my very special price for the most innovative design. My clear favorite was Labelhead, not just a logo but an entire logo configurator. Here is my long description why this is the most innovative (and in any case customizable) logo! (and this posting also gives you a rare view of my living room :-)

Third: Participants of an open innovation project get engaged and personal: The entire competition drew more than 2800 entires, generated millions of hits and views, a lot of postings and good press for Spreadshirt -- and did not cost really too much compared to the cost of getting a professional new logo (and PR campaign) from a regular agency (cost were about 10 K Euro for prices, Adam Fletcher's salary of running the contest, and some web site programming etc ..). The best insight into the enthusiasm and engagement of the participants can be found in the comments to the posts, just browse through some of the winning designs or see the comment on the selection of the winners (example).

For me, it was was interesting to read what people really thought about my selections (more comments here). I think I really do not look like a designer or pretend to know much about graphic design -- my task was to provide a business and customization perspective for the panel. But participants expected my real feedback on their designs ... learning_ pick panelists that really know what they are writing about.

Fourth: I learned a lot about customized toilets :) See comments in the middle of this stream.

Rapid Manufacturing for Mass Customization: Good Report in DESIGN NEWS Analyzes Recent Development

Joseph Ogando, Senior Editor of DESIGN NEWS, a trade publication, recently published a great feature article on “ Rapid Manufacturing's Role in the Factory of the Future”.

It reports on the use of laser sintering and similar direct manufacturing technologies not just to make prototypes but also to turn out production parts. It’s a practice that goes by many names — including rapid manufacturing, direct digital manufacturing, solid freeform fabrication and low-volume-layered manufacturing. All of the names refer to the use of additive fabrication technologies, which were initially intended for prototyping, to make finished goods, instead. Rapid manufacturing is considered to be one of the main enablers of mass customization of the future.

The report has a number of nice case studies and analyzes the main challenges or rapid manufacturing:

The biggest barrier in the coming years is seen with regard to materials. Some additive parts simply don’t measure up to their molded, machined and cast counterparts when it comes to tensile and other mechanical properties. … Another material issue involves freedom of choice. With additive technologies, engineers currently have to settle for a limited materials line-up. But as the article shows, the scope of applicable materials is fast growing.

A second barrier is seen in the persistent lack of design data. “it’s not so much that current prototyping materials have some shortcomings as the fact engineers have no way of knowing exactly what those shortcomings are.” The article cites a lack of long-term creep and environmental data for additive plastic parts and fatigue data for metals as the most glaring examples of this data deficiency. But rapid manufacturing observers expect more and more data will become available as direct digital manufacturing becomes more popular. In the meantime, large OEMs with stringent manufacturing requirements have worked to develop their own property data.

A third barrier quoted in the report are the capabilities of the existing machinery. Making good production parts every day ups the ante on process repeatability, quality control, throughput and reliability. “Today’s additive fabrication systems aren’t completely ready for prime time. They’re still primarily prototyping machines that you can coax into working as manufacturing systems”´, an industry expert is quoted in the report.

But despite these limitations, the article comes to a positive conclusion:

“With all these factors weighing against direct digital manufacturing, you might wonder, why bother? But, these additive systems already offer design benefits that can offset their manufacturing limitations.

For one, additive machines can produce complex part geometries without regard to conventional manufacturing limitations. Additive fabrication methods based on powder metal beds, for example, can enable parts with interior cavities and features that could not be machined or cast — at least not in an economical one-piece part. ... The upshot of all this design freedom, and the benefit most cited by advocates of direct digital manufacturing, is parts consolidation.

How long will it take for engineers to recognize the design benefits associated with additive processes? Todd Grimm, a consultant to the rapid prototyping industry, thinks it could take 10 or even 20 more years given the current lack of familiarity with additive machines and the technical barriers associated with the machines themselves. …

For a handful of applications, though, the future is now. The best known and highest volume direct digital manufacturing niche has, so far, involved applications where mass customization plays a role. 3D Systems’ Reichental points to the hearing aids as one example and also says RM machines have seen use in the production of casting tools for Invisalign braces. And as the additive machines in general become more capable, … they’ll play a stronger role in other kinds of customized medical and dental devices whose geometry is tailored to the requirements of individual patients.”

Context:
- Read the full article here: Joseph Ogando, Rapid Manufacturing's Role in the Factory of the Future, Design News´, 26 July 2007

- Other reports on rapid manufacturing in this blog.

- Browse the program of the MCPC 2007 to explore talks and presentations on rapid manufacturing during the conference.

Puma BBQ for Millionaires: Puma cooperates with Italian luxury brand Schedoni to offer special collection of customized shoes

Earlier this week, I was in London for a workshop. As I had some time to spare, I browsed through Harrods which was just opposite my hotel. In te store, I found at least ten different customization offerings, including custom gold clubs and a “mi adidas” sales unit. But in the men’s shoe department (not in the Sports department!), I discovered a new Puma mass customization offering which was already launched in April of this year, but apparently is so exclusive that I did not discover it before.

To upscale its BBQ offerings, Puma cooperated with Italian luggage maker Schedoni, one of the top Italian luxury brands. The company has a special line of luggage for your new Ferrari, or offers bullet-proof briefcases used by the Italian secret service, and, since a few years, also hand crafted shoes (shoe manufacturing was the original core of the company).

To supplement your Ferrari (or Volkswagen) experience, Schedoni is now teaming up with Puma to offer a line of driving shoes that can be customized with regard to color. In London, I now saw this system in operation. Fitting to the craft nature of the product, the configurator is a low-tech high-touch system. In London, I could play around with the shoe building "Puzzle Kit" which allows you to choose from a wide variety of leather colors for both the outer leather, and a contrasting leather color that shoes through the familiar PUMA logo in the side of the shoe.

The Motortrend blog knows that “no more than 500 of each combination will be made, and each numbered and personalized.” But for 350 British pounds a pair (almost 700 USD), I personally found this a bit to expensive for a pair of high-end sneakers.

Like with the Puma BBQ system, the Puma-Schedoni configurator will rotate in 50 Puma stores worldwide and will be introduced in selected high-end department stores. The production process will take about 4-6 weeks, and will be performed in the Modena factory of Schedoni. Shoes will be shipped to the customers’ home afterwards.

While the press and blog reports that I found about this system all claimed this great combination, the actual display at Harrods was a bit disappointing. Indeed, they had this great leather traveling trunks shown in the picture left (all pictures from PUMA via Pumatalk.com) but sample shoes (in the boxes left and right) and leather patches were unorganized and looked used – and this even in the high-end atmosphere of the Harrods footwear department. This is a typical other example of using mass customization as a brand building exercise. Such a system does not really demand much effort in introduction, but has large press appeal and underlines the fashion appeal of Puma.

What the benefit for Schedoni is, I am not sure. They could have made this as a profitable stand-alone business with much higher margins, I believe, and perhaps a better positioning in the market.

Context:

More pictures and reports in Motortrend and Pumatalk
And my previous posts on customized sneakers.

Threadless in Numbers

Rob Walker finally reports in his ‘Consumed’ column in the New York Times Magazine on Threadless, and finally I recognize (thanks to Exciting Commerce) this article that already was published on July 8. Rob’s column is one of my favorite pieces of journalism, but since I returned to Germany, I do not find the time to read it every week.

While in an e-mail conversation Rob told me about 1.5 years ago that he does not consider Threadless as a unique phenomenon, he – luckily – changed his mind and brings a nice analysis of the company and shares with us a number of interesting numbers on Threadless. So here is Threadless in numbers (all quotes from Rob's article)

2000: Year of founding Threadless.

125: Number of submissions received by Threadless each day.

“Millions”: Dollars earned by selling T-shirts” not by hiring star designers but by asking anybody to design them.

Hundreds of thousands: Number of user voting each day.

6: Number of new T-shirt offerings per week.

1,500: Typical size of a batch of each new design.

2,000: Dollars paid to winning designers.

“Almost everything”: Number of items that sell out.

1: Number of Threadless stores, the first opened in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago in July 2007.

2.6 or higher: Score of most winning designs (on the rating scale from 0 to 5).

2.0: Lowest rank of a winning design.

x*n/z: “The final decision about which T’s actually get made and sold has always involved a bit of nonpublic number crunching. For example, Threadless looks at how many 0s and 5s a design gets; designs that inspire passionate disagreement often get printed because they tend to sell”.

1: There is a surprising degree of consistency — maybe even similarity — in the designs. “It’s a barometer of what’s going on in art and design right now,” Threadless director Kalmikoff suggests.

17: Number of winning designs submitted by Glenn Jones, a New Zealand designer.

Context:
- Rob Walker’s NYT Magazine article on Threadless.
- My original report on Threadless (includes many more links with reports).

BMW’s Mini Brand Launches Custom Roof Designer Online

Evaluation of the new roof design toolkit and some ideas for improvements and additions

Driving a BMW-Mini often is seen as the ultimate expression of individualism. People paying the extra premium for a small, but fun car often select a Mini to express their individual lifestyle and to set themselves ahead from the crowd. For me, this always seemed to be a bit a contradiction, as I have seen very few really “cool” people driving a Mini, and at least in Germany, Mini drivers seem to follow a general pattern of belonging to a conservative upper middle-class medium aged segment living in larger cities. (I have, however, to admit that driving a Mini really is fun and a very nice experience).

Also, from a mass customization point of view, a Mini has rather limited customization offerings. While the configurator suggests plenty of choice options, they are rather limited, especially with regard to style customization like color combinations between body, roof, and interior. All choices seem to be perfectly balanced to deliver neatly tuned combinations fitting the Mini brand image as seen by its corporate parents.

But now, there is ultimate choice. Customers now can freely design the Mini’s roof with their very own design. The roof is one of the signature design features of the Mini. It is often selected in a different color than the body. And now you not only can select from 15 or so standard colors, but really design your own, as the German weekly Der Spiegel reports in its online edition.

Enter the Mini Roof Designer, a very well done playful online design toolkit that allows you to generate your own roof design. The configurator is full of nice gimmicks providing a great experience, but not really helping you to come up with a better design. As far as I could evaluate this configuration toolkit, this – in the moment – is a pure marketing gimmick. You can design your roof and save it, but that’s it.

According to the regularly well informed Der Spiegel, however, you also can order very soon your individual design in form a custom-made foil with your individual pattern that your Mini dealer will fix on your roof. (and in the Carscoop blog I read that the orders are available only in Italy for the time being, Germany will follow in June, Austria in the third quarter, with further countries being added later).

Given the high prices for extras for the Mini, 400 Euros for this service seem to be not too expensive. I bet there even will be fans ordering their custom roof stickers without even owning a Mini. And I am looking forward to see all the really custom designs printed on Mini cars and how they match the look of their owners. Have a look in the gallery of the Roof Configurator to see what I mean.

Nice idea. Some thoughts I had while playing around with the configurator how to improve this offering :

(1) It will be interesting to see if and how Mini approves all designs and whether there will be limits of what people can print. For the online gallery publicly showing your saved design, a manual approval process takes place. After I saved my Mini, the system told me that it will take ONE WEEK to approve my design before it is online. Hey, we are in an online, real-time, instant gratification world and the automotive industry is talking about the Three-Day-Car http://www.3daycar.com/!!

(2) It is rather difficult to come up with a nice design. The system offers many tools, but as an average user without design skills, it is difficult to come up with something creative. Easy-to-modify starting designs are missing. Also, I would have loved to get some more inspirations, perhaps by famous designers sharing their own Mini roof. And if I would be a professional designer, I would love to be able to upload a design made in Photoshop or any other professional design program using a template provided by BMW.

(3) The custom Mini roof sounds like a perfect idea for a new Threadless clone . Let the best in the world design roofs in form of an open (ongoing) competition, and let the community of Mini fans and owners evaluate the designs and vote on the winners. Then produce these designs in limited editions and sell them within days.

(4) Or a modification of the Spreadshirt idea: Let users design roofs, and sell their individual designs to others. Designs are then individually printed, and designers get a share of the proceeds. Perhaps this also is a great after-sales tuning idea. Think of transferring the BEMZ idea of tuning IKEA sofas onto Mini roofs: Create custom Mini roof covers and sell them independently for 200 Euros. Given that about 1 Mio. New Minis have been sold, this sounds like a nice market opportunity.

So many opportunities for mass customization in the automotive industry. Let’s see what is happening next.

How mass customization really works -- Spreadshirt

Spreadshirt has a nice video on their blog that shows how a custom product really is made. You would expect a lot of high tech machines .. but the secret are many many hands and human labor ... given this complexity and the German wage level, it is amazing that the custom t-shirts do not cost more (but perhaps workers are just paid in t-shirts).

Or, as the company's founder writes:

"When people visit one of Spreadshirts manufacturing sites, they are often surprised. they expected a big machine, somebody pressing a few buttons and a customized shirts to emerge. instead they find real manufacturing. real people taking real apparel from shelves (hard till impossible to replace with robots at a competitive price with nowadays tech), real people preparing the designs, real people pressing the shirts, real people doing quality control and packaging."

Here is the video about the reality behind one of the largest mass customization consumer sites (show this video to your local government funding agency, and they will provide you money as this shows the labor effects of a mass customizer in town)):

Link: sevenload.com

Open Design by Ronen Kadushin

Exhibition of his latest open designs in Appel-Gallery in Berlin, May 12-20, 2007

A frequent topic in my public lectures is the “open design” project by Ronen Kadushin, an Israeli product designer living in Berlin, Germany. Ronen created this product line to close the creative gap between product design and other fields, such as music, graphic design, animation and photography that are traditionally more connected to political, social and economic flows and issues. Inspired by the Open Source movement, he released the designs under a Creative Commons license, which means that you are allowed to reproduce them for personal use. Each design can be downloaded along with a description and a 'blueprint'.

“Industrial design is becoming more and more a toy for rich people … dominated by large names and big companies”, Ronen once explained to me in an interview. Industrial design industry is monopolized by a number of large producers (manufacturing and distributing the designs), focusing on the concepts of less than 150 “famous” industrial designers whose concepts are recognized. All the thousands of other well talented designers are just serving the elite. His intuition was that this system was just producing too much “waste”: Even of the more established designers, only one out of twenty design concepts are becoming products, the rest is just creative waste.

As a result, the concept of Open Design was born. The idea is to find a new logical method how design could be working, using open source software as a working model. His designs are two dimensional "cutout" represented as digital information. It relies on the internet's communication resources, to publish, distribute, and copy the designs under a CreativeCommons deed. Coupled with the flexibility of CNC production methods and their broad availability due to new enablers like emachineshop.com, all technically conforming designs are continuously available for production, in any number, with no tooling investment, anywhere and by anyone.

The latest developments and objects of this project will be exhibited in Berlin in a new exhibition in the Gallery “Appel-Design” (Torstrasse 114, 10119 Berlin Mitte) from May 12 to May 20. Meet Ronen during the exhibition’s opening on May 13, 6pm.

For more information on the exhibition, click on the picture or go to Ronen’s website http://www.ronen-kadushin.com.

Automotive Customization 2.0: The MIT City Car project

The MIT City Car project was one of the initiators to host the upcoming MCPC 2007 World Conference on Mass Customization & Personalization at MIT. Coordinated by the MIT Media Lab, this project looks into the future of the car. And this future is much more than faster engines, a futuristic shell or more entertainment features in the car, but it is all about delivering a highly personalized mobility solution.

The main idea: The future of the car is a shopping cart. Well, a very special shopping cart. Sponsored by General Motors Corp., a team lead by MCPC 2007 conference chair William Mitchell and MCPC 2007 coordinator Ryan Chin, is building a prototype of a lightweight electric vehicle that can be cheaply mass-produced, rented by commuters under a shared-use business model, and folded and stacked like grocery carts at subway stations or other central sites.

The Boston Globe recently published a nice update about this project, and also has a great interactive graphic on its site that explains the concept. “Dreamers have been reinventing the wheel since the days of cave dwellers. But the work underway in "the Cube," the Media Lab's basement studio, may be the most ambitious remake yet.”, Globe writer Robert Weisman reports in this article.

The main idea to totally redesign the car was to move everything what today drives and controls the car into the wheels. Embedded in each of its four wheels will be an electric motor, steering and braking mechanisms, suspension, and digital controls, all integrated into sealed units that can be snapped on and off. With this design, the rest of the car can be designed totally new from the sketch. By removing as much hardware from the car as possible, a totally new design is possible.

The main visible feature is the car’s stackability. The idea is that you do not own a car, but just take one within a city when you need it – a modern interpretation of the (perfect) Boston based car sharing service ZIP car or Germany’s “Call-a-bike” system. As space is often a constrain in the city, cars will be foldable away to occupy as little space as possible when not in use. It is much easier to see than to explain how this will work, so have a look at this interactive graphic.

But the MIT team still recognized that cars often are an object of personal impression and more than just a seat in a public transportation system. This is where personalization comes into this system. . "We think of the car as a big mobile computer with wheels on it," Ryan is quoted in the Globe article. "This car should have a lot of computational power. It should know where the potholes are." And it also knows how you like your car. Once you have rented a car, the software that sets passenger preferences, changes the color of the cabin, controls the dashboard look and feel, and even directs drivers to their popular parking spaces next to their destination.

As the MIT researchers envision it, the City Car won't replace private cars or mass transit systems but ease congestion by enabling shared transportation in cities. Commuters could use them for one-way rentals, swiping their credit cards to grab a City Car from the front of a stack at a central point such as a school, day-care center, or office building. "What you'll be buying is mobility," Chin said.

"The existing infrastructures can't support the population growth that we're seeing, so we're going to have to find viable alternative vehicles like the one MIT is designing," Rebecca Lindland, director of automotive research at Global Insight in Lexington, is quoted in the Boston Globe article.

The MIT City Car concept transfers a piece of hardware into a product-service-system that delivers a truly customized service as a bundle of products and service components, some mass produced, some adaptable, some customized for each user. The first real working prototype of this car is scheduled for presentation on the MCPC 2007 conference. "I think we'll be driving it around the interior of our building," Chin said, "and hopefully ask the MIT police to let us drive it around a parking lot."

In a dedicated track on this conference, we invite researchers and managers to discuss this concept and present their own visions of the custom car of the future. (http://www.mcpc2007.com). In general, the idea of product-service-systems is a promising option for many customization offerings in several industries:

- Why not add a custom training plan to your custom sports shoe? (a great example for this is the Nike Plus Personalization program)
- Customization of cell phones may not only include a custom cover or your personal ring tone, but a service that configures your phone to your profiles, adds your phone books – and comes with your personal service plan that adjusts the pricing structure to your personal need.

The next customization trend: Gadget Tattoos -- and how you easily can participate

I was pretty busy with my university job in the last weeks, and so I missed this really interesting story that Springwise reported last week, but that has been around some weeks longer. It is a nice example for this blog as it perfectly mixes its two main trends: mass customization and open (source) innovation:

Adafruit offers custom laser etching of laptops, iPods, phones, cameras and more. Among the hip tech set, laser etching is a next step--somewhere after stickers and custom Timbuk2 laptop messenger bags—focusing on personal flair on top of a laptop, not just it screen (how cool is that: synchronize your desktop image with your laptop case).

Adafruit currently operates in New York and is planning to set up a location in San Francisco early this year. Customers can have a small gadget etched for USD 30, and a laptop for USD 100. Bulk rates and services are available to businesses. To open such a business, is not too difficult: Just get an etching machine, some training and let the crowd come. And it is even easier.

Adafruit is a company with an open source business model: It freely shares its business model with other entrepreneurs interested in setting up a customization shop. The company was launched by Phillip Torrone, senior editor of Make magazine, and Limor Fried. The laser etching machine used by Adafruit is an Epilog, priced at around USD 20,000 and capable of doing highly detailed etching (1200 dpi). If a group of interested etchers organizes in a group to buy the machines in a larger batch, they should be able to make a head start by getting the machine's price down.

So f you're interested in setting up your own laser etching business, contact Adafruit at laser@adafruit.com.

More information:
Video: one.revver.com/watch/122276
http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-6143072.html
http://www.techmeme.com/061212/p70#a061212p70

Printing T-Shirts and Money – Inside Story in the Chicago Tribune on Threadless

The Magazine of the Chicago Tribune, one of the large US quality newspapers, recently featured a LARGE (7 page) cover story on Threadless and their user-design t-shirt business. I talked extensively with Steve Johnson, the article's author, some weeks ago about the business idea behind Threadless. He did a great job in documenting the past, present, and future of Threadless. Read the entire story here.

Here are some interesting quotes from this article:

The Art-Gallery Model.

"They [Threadless] have this innate understanding that what they are really selling isn't a T-shirt so much as the tale of how it came to be, a narrative that involves an artist, a community and a company that sets itself among, rather than above, that community.

"I always compare it to an art gallery," says Nickell, who's 26 and holds the title of president because, in addition to programming the site … and doing designs of his own, he deals with the lawyers and accountants and landlords. "You have people who come in and look at the art, people who made the art, people who are buying the art."

User manufacturing. In the article, Jim Coudal, a Chicago based consultant, summarizes the Threadless model with the great phrase "If they come, we will build it." And indeed, that is some of the quintessence of the Threadshirt business model -- and of other businesses which focus on providing manufacturing capabilities to users:

Threadless is "not building something and selling it to an audience. They're building an audience and selling them what they say they want. .. The Internet has also helped Threadless find and take advantage of the world's "distributed creativity." Just as there are great writers who now have an outlet via blogging, there are great designers who have an outlet via things like the Threadless competition."

Interactive value creation. Steve Johnson then quoted me very neatly, summarizing why Threadless is a perfect example of "interactive value creation":

Distributed creativity "is a very difficult thing to get. In a normal company, you identify the coolest artist and commission him or hire him. What they do is they broadcast their problem: Who makes me the best T-shirt? From an economic point of view, you don't have to know who is the best person. You let them self select. Of course, it only worked because, in their case, they have a lot of desperate artists out there. You have a lot of unemployed graphic design graduates. And they somehow exploited this, but to mutual benefit."

Fashion as Pop-Songs. Patric King, a prominent Chicago designer, compares in the article the Threadless model with a pop song:

"What [Threadless is] doing is just sort of building the wearable equivalent of the pop song," King says. "They throw it up and see what climbs up the Top 40. I've run across a couple of other companies trying to do the same thing, but the work's just not as good. For some reason they just get prettier stuff. Their community has just sort of trained themselves that that's their standard."

A new support industry. Share of labor is the oldest economic principle. And it also helps at Threadless. The article reports about Cody Petruk, a graphic designer for a Canadian software company who owns "about 60" Threadless tees and has seen three of the 13 designs he's submitted get printed. But Petruk also runs a web-site, threadies.org, which supports user designers to participate and win in the Threadless contests. A consultancy for t-shirt designer (McKinsey and BCG, listen!).

The limits of the Threadless model.

"But there are also questions about how much growth a community can endure before it stops feeling like a community. Right now the site is a free-flowing and very entertaining mix of design submissions, which registered users grade on a scale of one to five, blog postings about the designs, links back to other projects and, of course, the store. In a recent week, Nickell says, they had almost 10 million page views from just 500,000 unique visitors.

But already, some longtime site users grumble that as the group has grown, the designs have moved away from their artsy roots and become too cutesy, too clever or too pop. The all-time best-selling Threadless shirt certainly isn't cute. Called "Flowers in the Attic," it depicts a svelte young woman shooting herself in the head, causing birds to fly out. The company has sold 30,000 already, compared to a typical first printing of 1,200 shirts, and is printing another 10,000 for the holiday sales rush."

And the article finishes with a job offer: The Threadless founders are currently considering to hire a COO to run the daily business of the company. Condition: a suit and no t-shirts.

After the article has been published, the Threadless users commented quite enthusiastically. One comment, posted by Radioactivejosh a few hours after the article was published, provides a great perspective why users love Threadless:

"The article hit it right on point; we don't just buy the shirts for the design, but for the story, the meaning, the explanation and the excitement of new prints. It all plays a factor. If I didn't read the explanation of Poet-Trees and I just saw it in Target, it would mean nothing to me. ...

I LOVE when i see people with Threadless tees, because i feel like I know them. They understand the shirts, they visited the site and browsed and saw something they liked. They weren't just trying to be trendy and went into Urban Outfitters ad bought a tee shirt they saw. Threadless tees have a lot more going into them than just buying them."

More information:
- The entire Chicago Tribune article in full text.
- The article with all pictures as an user scan.
- Discussion about the article at Threadless with more customer voices.
- My report on Threadless in this blog
- How Look-Zippy developed the Threadless model further

PS: If you want to know EVERYTHING about the upcoming T-Shirt-Economy: Adam Fletcher, who wrote his master thesis about Threadless and is now working for Spreadshirt, maintains a great blog about t-shirts, with plenty of references to mass customization and user co-design: www.hiphipuk.co.uk

Mass Customization Case Study Collection -- New Issue of the Mass Customization Journal Published

A new issue (No. 4, Vol 1) of the International Journal of Mass Customization has just been published (see here for more general information). This issue is a special CASE STUDY issue containing eight cases from the International Mass Customization Case Collection, an initiative of more than 25 international researchers collaborating to build a broad basis for empirical research on mass customization. The idea of this project, coordinated by Klaus Moser at TUM, is to document current practices of mass customization businesses in a form that allows rich cross-case analysis and learning from previous experiences.

We are happy that we now can present the first eight cases of this collection in one issue, starting with three cases of mass customization of industrial goods:

* APC, a provider of data centre infrastructure from the US and Denmark,
* MarelliMotori, a manufacturer of electric motors from Italy,
* F.L.Smidth, a Denmark-based manufacturer of complex process plants for the construction industry.

Then, three case studies from the footwear industry provide the opportunity for cross-case analysis in one industry:

* Adidas, an international manufacturer of sports goods based in Germany,
* Left foot, a Finland-based worldwide operating provider of custom men’s shoes, and
* Design&MC Lab, a research lab and model plant for the mass customization of footwear based in the Italian shoemaking capital, Vigevano.

The two remaining cases focus on special objectives connected with the implementation of a mass customization strategy in business-to-consumer markets:

* Steppenwolf, one of Europe’s leading manufacturers of custom bicycles, and
* Turo Tailor, a Finnish manufacturer of apparel (men’s suits).

See here for authors and abstracts of all cases.

Full text access to the cases demands a subscription of the journal. But: Due to the cooperation with the publisher, we now can offer to all past participants of our conferences (MCPC, Deutsche MC Tagungen, IMCM, etc.) full online access to all issues for a very (really!) good price. Please contact me for more information and to get the special subscription form. Disclaimer: I am neither the publisher of this journal nor do I profit in any form from its sales or subscriptions.

Related posts on this topic:

- First issue of IJMassC published
- Special issue on Customer Centric Enterprises published

PS: We are extending this collection. If you want to contribute a mass customization case, please contact me as well (Important: Cases have to be contributed by independent scholars, not by members of the case company described!)

Consumer Created Branding: Rob Walker on Minibrand Entrepreneurs, The T-Shirt Economy and Why This Is an Alternative to Mass Customization

The NYT Magazine (July 30, 2006 issue) has an interesting cover story on ("The Brand Underground"). It provides a great insight study in the world of consumer created branding, the minibrand entrepreneurs. In great detail, NYT columnists Rob Walker draws the picture of leading-edge consumers who turn their lifestyle into business.

Trendwatching.com called these consumers minipreneurs. Their scope of activity is broad, "Some design furniture and housewares or leverage do-it-yourself-craft skills into businesses or simply convert their consumer taste into blog-enabled trend-spotting careers." Walker writes. "Some make toys, paint sneakers or open gallery like boutiques that specialize in the offerings of product-artists." All of them produce products which are a perfect illustration of the Long Tail.

Most of them also serve the need for uniqueness for the people buying them. You don't purchase (often for a large amount of money) a product from a small sub-brand because you want to look like every teenager in Urban-Outfitter clothing. This makes these minibrand entrepreneurs an interesting alternative model to mass customization: Instead of co-designing an own product, a consumer may turn to one of the minibrands to feel individual. Interestingly, the categories where minibrand entrepreneurs are most active, t-shirts and sneakers, are also two of the largest categories of mass customization in the consumer good field.

Rob Walker's main theme in the article is how corporate or anti-corporate these consumer-generated brands are. On the one hand, their founders see their brands as a "cool" way to earn a decent living. But still:

"Many of them clearly see what they are doing as not only noncorporate but also somehow anticorporate: making statements against the materialistic mainstream — but doing it with different forms of materialism. In other words, they see products and brands as viable forms of creative expression."

To look into this paradox and generate a better understanding of the minipreneurs, Walker focuses on the t-shirt economy. He quotes three trends or enabling factors that helped small t-shirt labels, which pop up in an enormous variety, to become one of the largest categories of consumer-generated brands:

"One thing that has changed since the days when they [the first sub-culture t-shirt labels of the 1980s] scrambled to make a living is that Japanese consumers have embraced certain small New York brands as something culturally significant and worth a price premium. Nigo, a Japanese designer, built a fanatical following for his A Bathing Ape brand partly because he collaborated with so many graffiti writers and others who had an aura of authenticity that impressed young, hip Japanese consumers.

The second change is technology, which has allowed production to become more accessible. (It is easier than you think for a two-person brand to work with factories overseas, using computer files and the occasional package.) The technology of the Internet has also acted as an amplifier. … There are blogs like Hypebeast and Slam X Hype dedicated to this practice, reporting dozens of new products or design collaborations from the brand underground every day.

There is a third factor: manufactured commodities have in fact become accepted as quasi art objects, and there is no more stark example than the sneaker. Hunting for unusual sneakers and modifying them with markers or different laces has been cool for decades, a phenomenon defined in Harlem and the Bronx."

While other minipreneurs may not build on the willingness-to-pay of Japanese teenagers, the two other factors are main enablers of many co-creation products as well. After reviewing the story of several user-created t-shirt labels (an world that sometimes even Walker as an expert admints not to understand totally), Walker comes to his conclusion -- and provides a great insight into the motivation of consumers to become active producers:

"If the dance between subculture and mainstream has always been more compromised than it appears and if every iteration of the bohemian idea is steadily more entrepreneurial than the last, then maybe a product-based counterculture is inevitable. Maybe subcultures are always about turning lifestyles into business — or the very similar goal of never having to grow up.

And I have to admit, the more time I spent with the minibrand entrepreneurs, the more I had to concede that what they have been up to is more complicated than simply imitating the culture they claim to be rebelling against. They believe what they are doing has meaning beyond simple commercial success. For them, there is something fully legitimate about taking the traditional sense of branding and reversing it: instead of dreaming up ideas to attach to products, they are starting with ideas and then dreaming up the products to express them."

Site note: Rob Walker has a regular column in the NY Times Magazine, where he often writes about a other great minipreneur, mass customization and customer co-creation businesses. He also has a great new blog site that should be worthwhile reading for you. This blog regularly links to his latest column, follows up on issues and ideas raised there, and "wants to advance the conversation about matters relating to what we buy and who we are": http://www.murketing.com/journal.

Open Source Footwear -- bringing customer co-design to a traditional industry

How the EU-funded CEC project wants to foster customer co-design in the footwear industry -- and why star designer John Fluevog is already doing it.

When people talk about open innovation, in most case it is related to high tech or science products as in the case of Innocentive, or software as with open source software. Then you have hip youth products like T-shirts, as in the case of Threadless' user innovation model [Threadless seems to be omni-present in the press and blog world today (I introduced Threadless in in this blog in August 2005; see for some updates on Threadless Business 2.0, Exciting Commerce, Crowdsouring, Innovation Lab DK, and of course at Threadless themselves).

But can the open source / user innovation idea also work with rather conventional products like, say, shoes? No high-tech sports shoes (see here for a recent paper on user innovation at Adidas, working paper version here), but good ol' dress shoes?

This is one of the issues Angelika Bullinger wants to find out as part of the "CEC-made shoes" project, a large integrated project funded by the European Community (PDF with project info) to modernize the European footwear sector. Angelika, who is a colleague at our TUM Research Group on Customer-Driven Value Creation (my permanent academic home besides my present residency at MIT), explores with researchers from Fraunhofer IAO and other institutions how footwear companies can become more competitive by fostering user innovation in this industry.

One way to do so is to install internet platforms (innovation toolkits) where users can evaluate new designs, give feedback or even create totally new designs. Given that shoes are one of the most common products we use, and also a very emotional one, I believe that there is a lot of potential to do so (mass customization, another concept that is also evaluated in the CEC project, is already getting more common in the footwear industry industry).

And some innovative shoe companies are already doing it: William C. Taylor reports in the New York Times today how Canadian shoe designer John Fluevog, one of the stars of his profession (loyal customers call themselves ''Fluevogers"), has been soliciting ideas from its customers -- encouraging brand enthusiasts to submit their own sketches for leather boots, high-heeled dress shoes, even sneakers with flair. He posts the submissions on his company's Web site, invites visitors to vote for their favorites and manufactures and sells the most promising designs.

''Customers want to express themselves, to be involved with the brand,'' Mr. Fluevog is quoted in the article. ''For so long, people would hand me a drawing of their personal design for a shoe or ask if I had considered an idea they liked. This program is a natural outgrowth of that desire for connection.''

As the NYT reports, until today the company has chosen nearly 300 finalists from the flow of sketches into its headquarters -- and introduced ten shoes based on customer designs, including the Urban Angel Traffic, a walking shoe (retail price, $179) designed by a customer in Moscow, and the Fellowship Hi Merrilee, a vintage-style pump ($189) designed by a customer in Provo, Utah.

Introducing customers in footwear design may have its limits: ''Some of the ideas from customers are striking, but impossible to make,'' Mr. Fluevog sayz in the article. What tends to work best, he explained, are intriguing twists on design themes that he and his colleagues are already exploring. ''But even submissions we can't make add to the stimulation,'' he added. ''Our customers get more involved, and we get insights into who they are and what they're doing. It's better for both of us.''

This is exactly where we want to extend the user innovation process with the research we do for the CEC project. Instead of asking consumers for sketches with a very wide solution space, sometimes representing impossible designs, the idea of an internet based toolkit for user innovation is that customers are guided and are designing within the capabilities of a specific company.

Eric von Hippel, head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has described this method for more high tech goods like semiconductors, food flavors, or plastics, before:

"In a time of ever more talented technology enthusiasts, hobbyists and do-it-yourselfers, all connected by Internet-enabled communication," he is quoted in the same NYT article, "the most intensely engaged users of a product often find new ways to enhance it long before its manufacturer does. Thus, companies that aspire to stand out in fast-moving markets would be wise to invite their smartest users into the product design process."

''It's getting cheaper and cheaper for users to innovate on their own,'' Professor von Hippel said. ''This is not traditional market research -- asking customers what they want. This is identifying what your most advanced users are already doing and understanding what their innovations mean for the future of your business.''

The fact that a successful designer like John Fluevog is thinking this way now as well is very promising – as it are often the internal designers or engineers of a manufacturer who oppose the idea that users and customers can be a source for innovation as well.

It will take for the very conservative European footwear industry some more years to think in such a way – judged by my experience from working with this industry (see my earlier comments on the slow adoption of mass customization there). Hopefully their customers, support by some clever Asian manufacturers, have not pushed them out of business until them. But we hope to contribute a bit with the CEC project that this will not happen.

I will keep you posted on the outcomes and progress in this research project. If you are from the footwear industry and want to explore user innovation (or are already doing so), let us know! We are permanently looking for further exploration partners from this industry.

Generative Design Software Helping Users With DIY Design

One of the core problems of turning customers into co-designers is the burden of choice and the design process itself. To modify a customizable object, one has to select from parameters, make choices, click through option lists, and make decisions what one likes. The same task is also often a burden for professional industrial designers when developing a new product. Design (and problem solving in general) is trial-and-error, and to proceed with such a process to an "optimal" design demands many iterations.

Here the idea of generative design comes in. Generative design allows to produce new designs automatically by the push of a button. A basic form, pattern, or object is automatically modified by an algorithm. The result: infinite random modifications of the starting solution (within a solution space set by the designer). This automatic generation of designs allows for a much faster trial and error process. Instead of crafting a few different designs, this technique allows to create thousands of different designs -- and choosing the best. It also allows for very new designs, as the process is not restricted to the imagination of the designer.

Or as this blog explains it:

"What if our products had genes just like our animals, insects and fish? Wouldn't it then be possible to consider a vast range of variation within product design standards, perhaps letting the ecosystem (marketplace) select on those traits that were most adaptive? "

That's the inspiration behind Genometri, a Singapore based company that has recently been promoting their new generative design technology. Their idea:

"Genometri is inspired by genetics, empowering the designer with the power of evolution--the design technology of life. It allows the rapid generation of a vast number of designs based on a generic model."

Consider the image below by Patrick Chia, which offers multiple takes on a simple stool base. All modifications are machine generated, not the result of a craft design process.

In the moment offered as an add-on to CAD packages like Solid Gold, Geometri's software Genovate allows designers to explore form, texture and color in infinite possibilities. Their key breakthrough is primarily the ability to create distinctive variations and the ease with which this generative model can be set up using standard parametric CAD packages. However, spinning this idea further and making this technology part of an online configuration toolkit could bring this power to consumers. This kind of tools will become an important enabler for users to become co-designers. They lower the burden of co-design drastically while still allowing for freedom of choice and an high degree of individuality.

Update: A nice application of generative design can be seen at www.futurefactories.com. This site by designer Lionel Dean uses the technology for designing light fittings. Coimbine this with rapid manufacturing and you have a great product idea ...

New Factory121 Watch Co-Design Toolkit Launched – Best-Of-Class Example For Online Configuration

After months of development and testing, the new configuration toolkit of Factory121, the Swiss custom watch manufacturer, has been launched. Already the earlier version of this toolkit has been a great example which I have used often as an illustration of a "perfect" online configurator for BtoC in my lectures and keynotes. The new version brought the tool on a new level, and is a model of what a good online configurator should be able to do.

It is a great example what is possible if a configuration tool is developed and implemented purposeful and with understanding of the specific demands of mass customization. The new version, launched in April 2006, has reinforced this evaluation and has set a new industry standard. There are still some minor bugs to be worked out and some possibilities for improvement remain (and co-founder Daniel Morf has told me that they are working on fixing these errors), but already at this stage the configurator is leading edge.

The main elements which I consider as best practice of the new 121TIME toolkits include:

- Different entry points into the configurator (direct, from the catalog, from an mailing, etc.)

- Strong and thoughtful pre-configuration (very important point to reduce complexity from the customers' perspective)

- Good structure of the different co-design levels (while rather complex and pretty filled, the screen nevertheless allows for a easy navigation between the different design options)

- High usability and representation of rather complex design opportunities, creating a flow experience of the user

- Strong rule set preventing "bad" designs (try to design an ugly watch, this is really difficult)

- Several options to safe, compare and share designs

- Very good "consultancy" and help functionality (plenty of fields explaining you all options)

- Strong and fast visualization (try the zoom function)

- Modular pricing system allowing each customer to purchase a watch according to her own willingness-to-pay (Factory121 is one of the very few companies in the customization BtoC market utilizing this opportunity)

- Possibility to use place the toolkit in a customized way in affiliate web sites.

While single aspects of this configurator may be matched by other online configurators, it is the combination of all of its features that makes the 121TIME toolkit superior to other. Try the tool here (as with many new internet tools, you need broadband for a good experience; but still sometimes the company's server performance seems to be slow): http://www.121time.com

Prior 2 Lever: Footwear Customization With Rapid Manufacturing

Volker Junior has been one of the most active players in the German mass customization scene for the last years. His special field of expertise is rapid manufacturing, i.e. the use of rapid prototyping technologies (like laser sintering) for manufacturing purposes. As a former marketing director of EOS, one of the leading equipment manufacturers for rapid manufacturing, he was preparing the market for these technologies.

But now he not just wants to see how others use this technology, but to utilize this technology by himself. He has teamed up with the British company PRIOR 2 LEVEL (P2L) to offer the first fully customizable soccer shoe. The idea was presented already as a concept during our MCPC2005 conference in Hong Kong in October 2005. But last week, the product finally was launched officially at the London College of Fashion last week.

Sure, also Adidas has offered customized soccer shoes which go much beyond the aesthetic design customization of NIkeID and others. However, until now, all mass customization programs for footwear are based on a match-to-order system: Feet of a customer are scanned, and matched to an existing last. In most systems, a different size for the right and left foot is possible, and the library of lasts is much larger than the traditional spectrum, providing a much better fit.

P2L, however, wants to go one step further: The football boot is designed uniquely for each individual player using selective laser sintering to produce truly custom outsoles and hand-crafted one-piece leather uppers. As the U.K. Blog GIZMAG reports:

"The upper is made of exclusively sourced calfskin from Italy which can be manipulated using sophisticated technology to adapt color, appearance and function to the athlete's needs. The outsole is designed using a three dimensional scan of the individual's foot dimensions and unique walking/running style. The bespoke fit of the boot coupled with the hand crafted one-piece upper (negating uncomfortable seams and improving contact with the ball) make for an incredibly light design that preserves energy levels without forsaking protection and comfort. …

P2L's system utilizes a biomechanically optimized outsole (the base of the boot) that supports, controls and conserves the player's musculoskeletal system. Individually positioned studs based on the athlete's foot structure minimize peak forces on the foot whilst walking, running and sprinting. P2L develops relationships with players on an individual basis to help reduce injuries, improve comfort and performance over their entire career."

As this quote indicates, the P2L boot is targeting a different segment than Adidas. And despite its high-tech approach, the whole system is much closer to craft customization than true mass customization. However, it is a test of rapid manufacturing technologies for the use in footwear customization. Product development was undertaken in conjunction with the London College of Fashion, Loughborough University's Rapid Manufacture Research Group and EOS GmbH Electro Optical Systems. If this experiment is successful, the development of the underlying mass customization technologies will have made a large step forward.

More information also at Loughborough University's Rapid Manufacture Research Group.

Ning.com - Mass Customization of Business Models and More

Social Web is one of the hot topics of the Web 2.0 paradigm. The term Social Web refers to an open global distributed data sharing network similar to today's World Wide Web, except instead of linking documents, a social web link people, organizations, and concepts. It builds on user-generated and user-distributed content. A new venture, online for less than 6 months, is now making the creation of social web applications, mixing and matching existing data in new ways, more easily as ever.

The idea behind Ning.com is to create a free online service for cloning, customizing and sharing Social Web Apps. Think of a "Playground" for finding, creating, and sharing web applications that enable anyone to match, transact, and communicate with other people. Ning's online platform allows users to painlessly create these web applications without any hosting demands or server administration hurdles.

Applications are created by users or by Ning. The existing standard social apps offered today include listings, reviews, ratings, recommendations, bulletin boards, dating applications, photo sharing, social bookmarking, wishlists, events, and people matching, among others. Examples are Map Mash-Ups (like Restaurant Reviews, Photo Maps, Review systems, Trail desriptions etc.), media sharing applications (Photo, Video, Book sharing), Social Bookmarks, Marketplaces (like Craiglist), Social Networking, Dating application, and many more. Users can also easily add commerce functionalities of Flickr, Google Maps, eBay, Amazon, or Yahoo! Search.

So what can users create and customize? Say, you want to create a web site which helps food loves in your region to share their favorite restaurants, add cook books written by local chefs, a matching service to find dinner dates, and a navigation system optimizing the trail for a restaurant crawl. Within a couple of clicks and trials, you can build such a web serve with Ning. This sounds for me very much like mass customization of business models: Take some generic modules, adapt and customize these, mix and configure them according to your vision, and launch the business – to either profit from it or just have fun by connecting with other people.

The idea is to put the power of social web apps in the hands of everyone. "We think it should be as easy as a few clicks to turn any great idea into reality. On top of that, we just think it's more fun when people share their great ideas.", the founders describe their motivation. "We want to put something out onto the web that inspires creativity and where it's fun to make things."

Ning provides users with a
- Free hosted environment
- Standard PHP & HTML modules,
- Lots of freely available PHP code to get you started
- SFTP support for own IDE
- The opportunity to create own ads
- Data sharing between apps
- Automatic user authentication
- a built-in search engine and tagging system, and much more.

How does Ning make money? All user generated sites have a generic Ning Sidebar to provide shared services, but also text advertising and links. I believe that they will also get provisions for purchases made at, e.g., Amazon though one of their apps. And the user base of Ning will become an important asset for the company. We will see if this idea takes off. But I liked the concept very much, and it shows a new frontier of user co-creation and mass customization in an area not discussed before.

MIT Course: Product Platform and Product Family Design: From Strategy to Implementation

MIT, July 31-August 3, 2006, Tuition: $2,800, Professors: Olivier de Weck and Timm Simpson

Info: http://web.mit.edu/mitpep/pi/courses/product_family_design.html

This class of MIT's Professional Education Program may be interesting for some of you, as it teaches some of the fundamentals of a mass customization strategy: the ability to deploy and manage a family of products in a competitive manner. The class will examine both strategic as well as implementation aspects of this challenge. A key strategy is to develop and manufacture a family of product variants derived from a common platform and/or modular architecture. Reuse of components, processes and design solutions can lead to advantages in learning curves and economies of scale, which have to be carefully balanced against the desire for product customization and competitive pressures. Latest theory, methods and tools in this field will be presented as well as a number of case studies from industries that have successfully leveraged platforms. Recent strategic issues such as embedding flexibility in product platforms as well as the effect of platforming on a firm's cost structure will also be presented.

Related open enrollment courses at MIT:

Demand Driven Supply Chain Management, July 19-20, 2006 (info)

Individual Choice Behavior: Theory and Application of Discrete Choice Analysis, June 19-23, 2006 (info)

Scientific Marketing: Modeling and Optimization for Strategic Promotions, June 19-20, 2006 (info)

Ping Fu, CEO of Mass Customization Enabler GeoMagic, named "Entrepreneur of the Year" by Inc. Magazine

Dr. Ping Fu was a featured speaker at the last MCPC 2005 conference in Hong Kong, and has been now named the "Entrepreneur of the Year" by Inc., a leading US business magazine.

GeoMagic develops and distributes a software, which allows to generate on-the-fly real time virtual models out of optical 3D scans. The so called DSSP process allows that millions of data points become an impeccable virtual model of the original part, ready to be measured, tested, tweaked, and reproduced. On the MCPC 2005, Ping Fu demonstrated how this process has been applied from helping dentists to produce dental components up to scanning and virtually modeling the Statue of Liberty.

But in the December 2005 issue of Inc., John Brant tells the story of the person behind the technology and how a team of wife and husband created these solutions. It is a really great, and also very stirring story very worthwhile to read:

"Over the past decade, Geomagic has defined and dominated the high-tech field of digital shape sampling and processing, or DSSP, which entails scanning an object with optical beams, then rendering it on a computer screen in full three-dimensional fidelity for manufacturing, testing, and inspection purposes. In the past five years, Geomagic's revenue has grown by 2,105%, to around $30 million a year.

DSSP technology holds so much promise because it is universally applicable; any object, animate or inanimate, natural or manmade, of any shape or size, still or, in some cases, moving, can be digitally processed. Within the past few years, DSSP--and Geomagic--has transformed the hearing aid and dental tech industries, helped digitally preserve the Statue of Liberty, streamlined the manufacturing process for Fisher-Price dollhouses, and recreated engine manifolds for a NASCAR racing team. Last summer, DSSP crossed into public consciousness by playing a key role in the perilous landing of the space shuttle Challenger; relying on Geomagic software, NASA engineers scanned and inspected the spacecraft's damaged shuttle tiles with a 10-foot-long robotic arm, and subsequently determined that they could safely withstand the stress of reentry into Earth's atmosphere.

While 2005 represented a breakout year for the company, an even brighter future beckons--and not just for Geomagic, but for manufacturing itself. By the end of the decade, three-dimensional DSSP technology promises to become as common as two-dimensional computer graphics are today. Ping's dream of mass customization, in which DSSP technology allows custom-made locally produced goods to be manufactured as cheaply as mass-produced outsourced ones, might come to pass. "

Read the full story here.

MIT Conference: Product Families and Platforms: From Strategic Innovation to Implementation (Nov 9-10, 05)

2005 Innovations in Product Development Conference
November 9–10, 2005, MIT Stratton Center (Building W20-307)
http://cipd.mit.edu/pd/index.htm

Join us at MIT for this important two-day conference on product platform design and product family management, which is organized in conjunction with MIT's Center for Innovation in Product Development.

The event will be entirely focused on the topic of product families and platforms. Rather than designing one product or service at a time, many firms have realized that they can increase their market share and profitability by offering strategically positioned families of products. In many cases these families can be developed based on scalable or modular platforms, which allow leveraging the benefits of commonality and standardization, while responding to the challenge of increasing mass customization.

Keynote speakers:

Professor Marc H. Meyer, Matthews Distinguished University Professor, Northeastern College of Business Administration. Lead Author of "The Power of Product Platforms"

Mr. B. Joseph Pine II
Author of "Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition". Literally wrote the book on the subject, loves to say that "Mass Customization will be as important in the 21st century as Mass Production was in the 20th."

Organizing Committee:

Prof. Olivier de Weck, MIT
Prof. Timothy Simpson, Penn State University
Prof. Chris Magee, MIT – Director CIPD
Dr. Suzanne Woll, United Technologies Research Center

For more information and regsitration go to http://cipd.mit.edu/pd/index.htm