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: Bruce Kasanoff of NowPossible.com on "Personal=Smarter"

Bruce Kasanoff is founder and editor of NowPossible.com, which "covers the leading edge of personalization". Bruce wrote the one of the first business books in our domain of mass customization & personalization, "Making It Personal" (2002). He was head of training, research and development for Peppers and Rogers Group, a leading personalization consultancy. The Chartered Institute of Marketing cited Bruce among their inaugural listing of the 50 most influential thinkers in marketing and business today. He works with innovative vendors and enterprises, helping them leverage personalization strategies to build lasting competitive advantage.

"Personal=Smarter," says Bruce, explaining that the more a company customizes, the smarter it becomes. The smarter it gets, the more formidable a competitor it becomes. He has delivered training programs, workshops and keynote speeches to a wide variety of organizations in 21 states and eight countries. His audiences have included technology executives, physicians, managers, customer service representatives and entrepreneurs.

And as he shares in the following interview, Bruce is writing a second book on the topic! So stay tuned for much more brilliant ideas from this great mind in personalization!

FTP: Bruce, there has been a long discussion about terms and concepts in our field. So, what is personalization in your understanding?

BK: Personalization is using technology to accommodate the differences between people. Done right, it's a win/win strategy for providing a better outcome for both the service provider and the individuals involved. For example, if a doctor gives you a test to determine which treatment will work best for you before she starts your treatment, that's personalization. Likewise, if a company gives you the option to tell them when and how to contact you, that's also personalization.

FTP: How is this different to mass customization, where are differences and complements between personalization and mass customization?

BK: Mass customization is a process for implementing personalization. In some respects, personalization is a goal and mass customization is one way to accomplish that goal. But we need to be careful about defining or debating semantics. Both personalization and mass customization push a company towards being more responsive to the marketplace and thus being more nimble. Both result in a firm that can react faster and more effectively to volatility. Both enable a company to build defendable competitive advantages, because both require a firm to track, understand and accommodate the needs of its customers.

FTP: You are one of the earliest voices and thinkers in the field. What originally drew your interest to the concept of personalization?

BK: I was very lucky. One day I read "The One to One Future" by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, and thought it was brilliant. At the time, I was working for Ogilvy & Mather, and I wrote a strategy brief for a client that used some of the personalization ideas from that book. Shortly thereafter, I saw a little story in our local paper announcing that Don and Martha were starting their company in my town! I sent them an email asking if they wanted a partner, and included a version of my brief. One week later, I was their partner. That was 1996, and it gave me the luxury of spending all my time thinking about personalization and working with many of the pioneers in the field.

FTP: What are recent trends you see with regard to personalization? Are there any industries or individual companies driving these trends?

BK: Personalization is everywhere, although it's not necessarily called that. I dare anyone to name an industry in which personalization is not playing an increasingly important role. It impacts how you search for information, share opinions, make decisions, place orders, use products, get service, and live your life. Google is a leading practitioner, and both IBM and HP are key enablers. For example, IBM's "smarter planet" approach is a wonderful embodiment of the "Personal=Smarter" logic I've been talking about for some time. I was thrilled to see one of the world's largest companies adopt this theme as a selling point for its clients.

The most important trend, just now emerging, is the opportunity to personalize the development and care of our bodies and minds. It sounds dramatic to say it, but personalized medicine and education will literally impact the future of the human race. At present, "personalized" approaches are being used to restore health and function to people who have a physical challenge, such as the loss of a limb or of control over their body (such as ALS.) But as these technologies get cheaper and more powerful, they will be made available to everyone. For example, a brain-computer interface that a "locked-in" individual uses to communicate (because he can't speak) will someday help students learn faster and more in tune with their personal learning styles.

FTP: What is the largest challenge still to be overcome in personalization?

BK: The way we think. Personalization is not a difficult concept to understand, but it is a difficult concept to apply. It's easier for managers to look at customers, projects and investments in isolation, but personalization requires a process – and a mindset - that pervades an organization. It requires a different culture, and near-constant care and feeding of that culture. Not many managers understand this, yet.

FTP: What would be your main advice for a manager who wants to lead a personalization or mass customization implementation?

BK: Spend 25% of your time and budget on training, and on changing your culture. When it comes to personalization, training is not a one-time thing. Your staff and your systems are used to a non-personalized approach; they will constantly try to shift back in that direction. Unless you anticipate this and work consistently to prevent such backsliding, it will prevent you from enjoying measurable success.

FTP: You recently started your new blog, nowpossible.com. The depth and width of content you have provided there just within the last two months is really astonishing! What was your motivation to start this effort, and who is your target audience?

BK: Thanks. I'm writing a second book on personalization called "You! and Improved!", and as you know, writing is a solitary process. The website gives me an opportunity to test ideas, get feedback, and enlist innovative people in my work. I have two target audiences. The first includes innovators in organizations who are making personalization work better and better. The second comprises thoughtful individuals who would like to understand and benefit from this trend that can change their lives for the better.

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

BK: That's simple. I want to gain control over my fate, to anticipate and thus prevent the afflictions that would otherwise shorten my life or reduce my quality of life; to stay strong and mentally sharp longer than previous generations; and to be able to find and connect with the people and ideas that personally interest me.

Contact Bruce Kasanoff at (203) 341-9448 or bruce (at) nowpossible.com

New International Executive Program on Mass Customization: Learn in three days the fundamentals to profit from mass customization and how to bring this strategy into practice

Mass Customization: Turning heterogeneous customers into a source of profitability

IE Business School, Madrid, 6, 7 and 8 of May, 2009

I am glad to announce a new Executive Education Program in cooperation with IE Business School (ranked as the 5th business school in the world in Open Programs by the Financial Times, May 2008) that wants to provide a strategic  introduction into how to implement mass customization in your organization.

Download Program brochure.

PROGRAM OVERVIEW

With this program participants will realize that offering superior fit to their customers’ needs does not have to necessarily come at the expenses of efficiency. Mass customization is a key strategy to meet this challenge. Many large corporations have started large-scale mass customization programs. The next one may be your company – you will learn why Mass Customization is far more applicable often believed. Most importantly, this program will introduce you to the different issues, tools and approaches that you can adopt to build profitability by serving differentiated customers’ needs – to move towards mass customization.

Over the past decade, we have studied mass customization in more than 200 different organizations. We found that mass customization is a strategic mechanism that is applicable to most businesses, provided that it is appropriately understood and deployed. The key is to view it basically as a process for aligning an organization with its customers’ needs. Mass customization is about moving towards these goals by developing a set of organizational capabilities  that will, over time, supplement and enrich an existing business.

"Mass Customization" is an innovative, ground-breaking international executive program designed to help executives gain competitive advantage by learning how to turn heterogeneities across their customers into a source of profits. Participants will gain a holistic understanding of the various capabilities – both organizational and individual – that their companies will have to develop in order to recognize and exploit heterogeneous customers’ needs. The program emphasizes a cross-functional approach and covers such issues such as organization design, CRM, and organizational change.

PROGRAM OBJECTIVES

This state-of-the-art program provides its participants with the latest practices and cutting-edge strategic insights to help them steer their organizations towards Mass Customization. The program is delivered by world-class experts on the topic, with excellent academic and practical experience.

Participants will develop a sound understanding of:

• Which capabilities your organization needs to move towards Mass Customization
• Which tools and approaches you can use to build these capabilities
• How to revamp your innovation processes to offer the “right customization”
• How you can you keep the costs of product and service customization under check
• How human capital contributes to achieving Mass Customization
• How IT and knowledge management can support Mass Customization
• How to orchestrate organizational change towards Mass Customization

For the full program structure, please download the program brochure.

WHY IE BUSINESS SCHOOL

IE Business School is a leading international business school oriented at providing top-level training for executives. The recognized prestige of its teaching faculty, the degree of excellence of the academic programs and a clear international focus are the keys behind a learning model that has ranked IE Business School among the best business schools in the world (IE Business School has been ranked the 5th business school in the world in Open Programs by the Financial Times, May 2008).

The Executive Education Programs offered by IE Business School aims to develop the vision, skills and management capabilities required to meet the many and varied challenges facing business organizations, both today and in the future. In recognition of the high quality and academic rigor of the programs, IE Business School is accredited by EQUIS (European Quality Improvement Systems), AACBS International (The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) and AMBA (Association of MBAs).

Together with my co-instructures, I invite you to join our mass customization community and benefit from a unique learning experience in an environment that nurtures top-level talent both professionally and personally.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, please contact:

Karen Hobbs, International Executive Programs Manager

karen.hobbs@ie.edu
Tel.: +34 91 782 17 15
Fax: +34 91 745 47 62
www.execed.ie.edu/internationalprograms

For more information, please download the program brochure.

New toolkit for 3D printing: Turn digital pictures into 3D art

I previously reported several times about Shapeways, a spinn-off from the Lifestyle Incubator of Royal Philips Electronics, located in Eindhoven, Netherlands. The company provides 3D-printing capabilities to everyone.

Part of their mission is to provide users a set of toolkits that allow also the average consumer to create 3D objects without any CAD or programming skills. Today, Shapeways has introduced their so called "Photoshaper", a service that allows anyone to turn digital photographs into 3D printed objects.

Users can logon to Shapeways.com, upload any photo and order their creations directly from Shapeways. Now you not only can see your girl friend in your wallet when you are on a business trip, but touch her in 3D!

“Shapeways really makes 3D creation fun, easy and available for everyone,” commented Peter Weijmarshausen, CEO of Shapeways is quoted in a press release. “With Photoshaper we have empowered the average consumer to tap into technologies that used to be out of reach. In doing so Shapeways redefines online consumerism with direct access to unique and individually customized products that were never available before.”

Based on the contrast of the picture (light and dark) the Shapeways Photoshaper automatically creates a depth-layered 3D object that can be printed by Shapeways with the latest in 3D printing technology (I believe with a little bit of photoshopping before uploading the pictures, results can be improved a lot). The 3D photo will be produced and delivered globally within 10 days and costs between $40-50 (USD), including shipping. For best results. use a 1.5 megapixel or better picture. The size of the 3D photo is 13cm to 9cm (5.11” to 3.5”) landscape and portrait.

Context:

• Shapeways Photoshaper is available at: http://www.shapeways.com/creator/photoshaper
• Previous report about Shapeways: 3D Merchandising Platform

Using Mass Customization to tune-up standard products: MyTego

In a press report, I read this interesting success story of mass customization provider MyTego. While the numbers reported have to valued based on their low starting point, it nevertheless is a great further example that mass customization makes sense and that the standardization of many products creates a growing after-sales "tuning" market for additional customization. The website is well done. The configurator is rather simple but it worked well and did its job, even if it does not reach the visualization qualities of a Zazzle or Nike toolkit. The main think that was missing on the site is a gallery with examples or staring points. For me, it was rather difficult to imagine how the final device would be look alike and what other designs previous customers made.

The following text is taken form the press release:

MyTego has increased sales an astonishing 311 percent over the short time frame of three years. MyTego.com provides customers with the unique opportunity to custom design vinyl Tego skins online, to place on any and all of their portable electronic devices.  The company has developed a complete patented production system that allows for individual manufacturing with infinite customer choices, with similar economies of traditional mass production.  As portable electronic devices become more and more common with very few customization choices, customers increasingly are looking for custom skins to place on their iPod or iPhone, BlackBerry, Motorola, Nintendo or any other portable electronic device they may own to make them unique.

The man behind this success is Doyle Buehler. He started the parent company, Imbibo, in 2002 in Winnipeg, Canada and licensed the technology to produce the personalized vinyl skins to MyTego Inc, also based in Winnipeg, in 2005.  The following year, 2006, MyTego licensed a European operation based out of Paris, France to start producing Tego skins for the European market.  MyTego reports that approximately 60 percent of their sales are orders from the United States, 20 percent from Canada, and 20 percent from the rest of the world.  Worldwide distribution of Tego skins is accomplished through a unique, patented online design studio that operates in more than seven languages.

Tego Skins are low-profile, protective, printed adhesive vinyl "stick-ons" that are applied to the surfaces of portable gadgets to make them stand out among the many identical devices surrounding them.  Customers can create Tego skins for any and all portable electronic devices including the majority of cell phone models, laptops, video game consoles, ebook readers, skateboard decks and much more. All devices with Tego skins remain fully functional with specific cut-outs for screens, buttons, keys, as well as cutouts allowing access to the device’s battery.

MyTego’s website, www.MyTego.com makes mass customization possible with online design tools allowing customers to create skins with no limitations except for their imaginations.  After the customer has designed a striking Tego skin, it is then manufactured individually to the exact specifications of the customer and shipped direct to the customer.  Tego skins go on easy and come off clean without leaving a residue so that they can be replaced regularly to remain up to date with fast changing trends.

MVM Visual Search - Free Webinar on new shopping personalization technology

In September last year, My Virtual Model (MVM) unveiled a first-of-its-kind personalization technology in a partnership with Sears and IBM (Note: I am using the term personalization according to my own definition, i.e. it refers to a customized shopping experience – I will work on an update on this definition soon).

Struggling retailer Sears is investing heavily in its web-site to counterbalance decreasing sales in stores by a great web experience, probably the right way to do! As part of this effort, Sears.com was the first company in the world to integrate MVM's new 3D visual search and e-commerce capability on its site. Now, after the x-mas shopping rush, Sears confirmed that the technology significantly improved and enhanced a consumer’s online shopping experience. Sears was the first retailer to apply both a visual search and virtual model to an entire catalog online.

The Sears site allows consumers to recreate their in-store shopping experience online by enabling them to search for merchandise using images versus words, and to virtually “try on” selected items using a personalized model of themselves to ensure that the style, color, pattern and fit are right before purchasing.

It is a great advancement in personalization and online experience (Disclaimer: I served on MVM's board of directors, so I may be a bit biased in my positive evaluation :-)

Next week, Louise Guay, President and Founder of My Virtual Model, is offering a free series of Webinars where the visual search application will be demonstrated, and where Louise also will comment on the achievements and challenges of this technology.

Louise will make a 30 minute presentation on:
- January 21, 12PM (ET)
- January 21,  4PM (ET)
- January 22,  4PM (ET)
- January 23, 12PM (ET)

To register for a Webinar, go here.

Topics of the Webinar:

• 3D Visual Search: use Key-Images to find what you are looking for sooner.
• How to create a scalable solution that covers 100% of your product assortment.
• Outfitting: create inspirational fashion looks.
• Targeted recommendations based on shopper’s profile and behavioral patterns.
• How to uses MVM to drive qualified traffic to your site.
• News from the Virtual Model community.

Update (Jan 20, 2008): Today, MVM announced its new Jeans Finder in cooperation with IndiDemin:

For more information, go their site. More information about indiDemin is in this previous posting.

The Top 20 of Mass Customization: A closer view on the agenda of the MIT Smart Customization Seminar

The upcoming Smart Customization Seminar at MIT will gather a great group of individuals representing some of the most advanced and interesting businesses in mass customization today. The seminar is targeting executives in the mass customization market and companies interested in launching a mass customization business or applying some of its principles to boost an established business.

Here is a more detailed look on the program with some comments. Participate at this unique event and register today!

For the full program, go the the seminar's web site at MIT.

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MONDAY, NOV 10, 2008 (starting at 2pm)

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Introduction & opening addresses: Frank Piller & B. Joseph Pine II, MIT Smart Customization Group: Joe Pine and I will start the seminar with two short keynotes highlighting key aspects of matters today in mass customization. We also want to provide a framework how to navigate the two days during the seminar.

Mass Customization Leaders: Adidas, Alison Page, Director, Mass Customization: Adidas' mass customization offering mi adidas is the premier example of custom sports wear since 2001, combining customization in all three dimensions: fit, style, and functionality (performance). Alison Page will talk about the learning of establishing the customization business unit within a global corporation.

Mass Customization Leaders: Business-to-Business Leader
We are talking to one of the most advaced examples of BtoB customization. Come back to see who will be speaking in this slot.

Mass Customization Next Generation: Spreadshirt, Inc. Jana Eggers, CEO
Spreadshirt represents a new breed of mass customization, combining personal creativity with the power of the social web. Spreadshirt has recently made it into the Top 5 European Growth list "Europe's 500". CEO Jana Eggers will share her experiences with leading a major customization brand, connecting average consumers, artists and corporations like Samsung, Coca Cola, or Chuck Norris.

Open Space discussion: Defining your mass customization strategy
Meet with a smaller group of peers to discuss your mass customization challenges and experiences. Groups will be facilitated by a leading professor in the field, providing also first-hand insight into the latest research to master your challenges.

Reception and networking dinner in the MIT Faculty Club

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Tuesday, NOV 11, 2008

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Opening address: William Mitchell, MIT Smart Customization Group, is a Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and directs the Media Lab's Smart Cities research group. Before coming to MIT, he was Professor of Architecture and Director of the Master in Design Studies Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He also taught at Yale, UCLA, Carnegie-Mellon, and Cambridge Universities. He holds a BArch from the University of Melbourne, MED from Yale University, and MA from Cambridge. He is a recipient of honorary doctorates from the University of Melbourne and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. In 1997 he was awarded the annual Appreciation Prize of the Architectural Institute of Japan for his "achievements in the development of architectural design theory in the information age as well as worldwide promotion of CAD education."Mitchell is currently chair of The National Academies Committee on Information Technology and Creativity.

Mass Customization Leaders: Masters in Configuration, Lars Hvam and Niels Henrik Mortensen, DTU and Co-authors of "Product Customization": Lars Hvam and Niels Henrik Mortensen are co-authors of the 2008 book "Product Customization: Designing Configuration Systems". Configuration is a key capability for mass customization. But setting up a configuration system is a holistic task that demands much more than just dealing with IT. Lars and Niels developed a methodology to implement a configuration system that helped pump manufacturer Grundfos to react on customer orders in 3 minutes instead of 3 days. American Power Conversion (APC), an infrastructure provider for data centers, could reduce its delivery time from 400 to 16 days. Learn from these and other examples how the latest methods for designing modular product architectures and configuration toolkits can improve the efficiency and customer satisfaction in your mass customization business.

Mass Customization Supply Chain Enablers: CustoMax.com, Bas Possen, Founder & CEO: "In general, too little use is made of the advantage, that all people are different." That's the credo of Bas Possen who manages Europe's largest network of retailers for mass customization, combining multiple vendors of custom goods and retailers on one single platform, both online and offline. Bas Possen brings more than a decade of experience in mass customization to the meeting, having established a number of successful companies in the field.

Mass Customization Entrepreneurs: Meet the next generation of mass customization: Following MIT's entrepreneurial spirit, we proudly present some of the best upcoming new ventures in mass customization. Learn from the founders what motivated them to invest in a mass customization business and get the latest insights from their research and experiences.

Paragon Lake just secured more than $7 million of additional financing, demonstrating ist leadership in the custom jewelry industry. Tikatok is an award-winning idea that empowers children to create their own books and get them produced in large or small quantities. MyFactory and Proper Cloth are start-ups of resent MIT Sloan School graduates in the field of custom fashion and apparel. Look for their latest ideas how they want to differentiate their sites in a crowded market. Sole Envie targets to become the first company in the US selling custom made footwear to women with a high design appeal.

All companies will be presented by their founders and CEOs and will provide a great opportunity to learn about what's hot in the customization market today and what market & technology trends are coming up.

Matt Lauzon, Co-Founder & CEO, Paragon Lake (Jewelry)
Sharon Kan, President & CEO, Tikatok, Inc. (Children books)
Sasha Revankar, Founder, MyFactory (Fashion)
Seph Skerritt, Founder, Proper Cloth (Shirts)
Monika Desai, Founder, Sole Envie (Women's footwear)

Mass Customization Integrators: Zazzle Inside: How Zazzle's infrastructure enabled Keds to offer custom sneakers rapidly, Zazzle, Inc., and Keds Corporation: Zazzle is the only on-demand retail platform for consumers and major brands, offering billions of one-of-a-kind products shipped within 24hours. Users can instantly create, customize to fit their personal style, purchase, and sell a near infinite array of products online. In an exclusive partnership with sportswear icon Keds, the inventor of the "sneaker", Zazzle created its first line of fully customizable sports shoes. The presentation will share the creation of a new customization assortment for Keds.

Mass Customization Leaders: Swarovski: How a leading international brand co-creates products with their customers, tba, Swarovski, Inc. & Johann Fueller, CEO, Hyve AG:  Swarovski is the luxury brand name for crystals around the world. With sales of more than $3 billion, the Swarovski group is one of the largest players in its industry. Still, Swarovski's organization is very customer-centric. Recently, the company explored a number of co-creation and customization initiatives which will be presented in this talk. The co-presenter of this talk will be Johann Fueller, who was responsible for the realization and implementation of several customer co-design toolkits at Swarovski.

Mass Customization Next Generation: Desktop Factory, Inc., Cathy Lewis, CEO: The goal of Desktop Factory is to make 3D printing as common in offices, factories, schools and homes as laser printers are today. Just as laser printers became ubiquitous in the last decade, so too will new uses for 3D printing emerge as devices become inexpensive and widely available. Customization and personalization is the main driver behind this trend. Started in 2004, Desktop Factory is the leading company to build a manufacturing system for each customer for less than $5000.

Changing the Game: How Video Games Are Transforming the Future of Mass Customization, Ethan Mollick, MIT Sloan School: Some of the world's best configuration toolkits today are not being developed to sell automotives or complex machine tools, but videogames. In his presentation, Ethan Mollick will share the latest insights on configuration toolkit development in this industry and what you can learn from this to develop state-of-the-art toolkits for your business. With David Edery, Ethan Mollick is the co-author of "Changing the Game: How Videogames are Transforming the Business World" (2008, Pearson Education/Financial Times Press).

Mass Customization Next Generation: i-Fashion: The Future of Personalization Today. Chang Kyu Park, Director, i-Fashion Technology Center, Korea and Yongsoo Park, CEO, i-Omni Co. Ltd., Korea: Virtual representations of products and customers are a key capacity of successful mass customization & personalization. They match customers' preferences to products and configurations. The i-Fashion Consortium in Korea operates one of the world's most advanced set-ups of virtual reality. Using virtual models based on an Intellifit body scan, consumers get personalized recommendations of products they may like. At the same time, vendors' efficiency increases due to the virtual -- and not physical -- representation of products for most stages of the value chain. Chang Kyu Park will discuss present achievements if i-Fashion and provide recommendations on using virtual models in your organization.

Open Space discussion: Implementing Mass Customization: Meet with a smaller group of peers to discuss your mass customization challenges and experiences. Groups will be facilitated by a leading professor in the field, providing also first-hand insight into the latest research to master your challenges.

Closing comments by Frank Piller & B. Joseph Pine II, MIT Smart Customization Group

For the full program and registration, go the the seminar's web site at MIT.

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

Mass Customization Gets Its First Novel: UK author Sean McManus explores personalized music

Interview: Sean McManus on personalized music, customized books, and why he is using on-demand service Lulu -- and the background of his idea to write a novel featuring a mass customized service offering as its key element.

Sean McManus is the author of ‘University of Death’, a new novel satirizing the music industry. The book explores what happens when a major record label comes up with software for mass customizing music and uses spyware to sell it to customers, without telling them it’s all computer generated. Sean’s previous books include ‘Small Business Websites That Work’ and ‘The Customer Service Pocketbook’. As a journalist, Sean has written for Making Music, Melody Maker, Internet Magazine, Business 2.0, Internet Works and many more. And he has covered mass customization before: In May 2000 he wrote the mass customization essay ‘As you like it’ about for Personal Computer World magazine and in December 2005, he interviewed the company behind Erasure’s customized MP3s for his website at www.sean.co.uk.

Sean, Congratulations! You have written the first novel I know with strong references to personalization and matching-services in the music industry! What's the story?

It's a satire of the music industry, centred around one of the last surviving major record labels, Bigg Records. Clive Bigg is gobbling up independent labels and marketing lowest-common-denominator tosh made by boybands. It’s not enough, though, and like every other label, he’s seeing his business shrink away.

Then one day the solution arrives: a smooth-talking geek called Jonathan Harrington has spent ten years creating the perfect song: moving enough to make you laugh, cry, or dance on the first listen. The catch is that it’s computer generated and tailored for each listener after analysing his or her music collection. Together, Bigg and Harrington conspire to use hidden software to study what fans listen to, and then to automatically concoct and market their dream music to them.

While all this is going on, the story also follows the progress of Dove, who is burned out from touring for decades. He wants to break up his 'creatively bankrupt' band, University of Death, but he couldn't do a proper job. Now Bigg's bought up the indie label the band was on, he's about to make Dove an offer he can't refuse.

And the story also follows two of Dove’s biggest fans: Simon and Fred have a band called Goblin (performing a mix of rock and glam they call 'heavy tinsel'). Like many bands today, they can't get anyone to listen to them, and hope that Bigg will pluck their demo from the pile and launch their careers. As well as doing their own stuff, they cover University of Death in the hope that they'll catch someone's ear. As it turns out, their cover gets them into all kinds of trouble...

Dove, Simon, Fred, Jonathan and Bigg all collide in a finale that threatens the very existence of the music industry.

The story takes a slice through the music business: from the board room to the stage; from the studio to the record fair. It explores how fans relate to their favourite bands, how businesses use technology to manipulate consumers, and what would happen if the music industry disappeared overnight.

Where did you get the idea for this book?

In the 80s I remember typing in a program listing that created music on the Amstrad/Schneider home computer. It sounded a bit foreign and unstructured to me, but it started a fascination with computer generated music that I’ve had ever since.

In recent years, we’ve seen the internet become a channel for both marketing and market research. We’ve seen the rise of technologies that make mass personalisation possible. And we’ve seen record companies backed into a corner and taking desperate measures to prevent piracy, epitomised by Sony BMG putting software on music CDs which was widely considered to be spyware. We’ve seen the start of artificial intelligence as part of our e-commerce applications, with Amazon knowing my taste in books and music better than I do. And we’ve seen the rise of independent bands through communities like MySpace, where high quality music can be shared and sold outside the conventional music industry. All these threads came together in my plot. It’s a timely book. In fact, when the Sony BMG story broke, it felt like my plot was starting to come true!

‘University of Death’ is ultimately about why people love music, and where its soul is. The book explores the extent to which that can be automated or faked. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that (in my novel at least), music needs to come from people, not machines. I listen to a lot of synthesiser music, but that works because there’s a creative person directing it and the computers are just being used as instruments. Even Brian Eno’s generative music, which is unique each time you listen to it, works because a creative musician has defined its parameters before it runs. The question is whether the software will one day be good enough that you couldn’t tell the difference between a computer inventing and performing a song, and real human creativity.

I know your early essay on mass customization (still a well linked source on the topic on the internet). Have you written any other books in the meantime?

I’ve written ‘Small Business Websites That Work’, published by Prentice Hall, and co-authored ‘The Customer Service Pocketbook’. There are free chapters to download from both at www.sean.co.uk.

Why did you want to write this book?

They say everyone has a novel in them. This is mine: it includes so many of the things I love - music, technology, record collecting, old computer games, jokes. But all of them in service of a story and bound together by a single theme. Everyone has something that they just know they have to do in their life, and writing a novel was one of mine.

It's been a long time since I've devoted that much energy to a single project, and it was extremely satisfying. I really enjoyed the writing sessions.

What are your observations on personalization of music in the real world? How often are you, as a consumer, using these services?

The most exciting thing for me has been Trust Media’s customised MP3s, made on-demand using a Flash interface. Erasure made best use of the concept: you could define what kind of beats, vocals, basslines and synth lines you wanted, as you heard the track looping. When you were done, you paid and downloaded your track. Each combination was limited to a single copy, and had unique artwork. The music industry’s been marketing so-called ‘limited edition’ CDs for years, with serial numbers on them often running into hundreds of thousands. This really subverts that: Having the only copy of my favourite version of a particular song and knowing nobody else can buy it is truly a ‘limited edition’. Erasure really appreciated what they could achieve creatively with this technology, and it would be good to see more musicians adopt it. Trust Media is pushing the antipiracy aspect at the moment: people are less inclined to share something that’s unique to them (and traceable), and others are more likely to want their own unique version than someone else’s copy. When the music industry is suffering a decline, it makes more sense for the company to sell antipiracy software than an experimental music format, even if they’re the same thing.

Brian Eno’s done some interesting work with generative music, where he sets the parameters of the work and then each performance is unique. There’s no computer creativity involved in this: it’s still very much his work, with the computer randomly generating each performance of what is essentially one work. His first release of generative music ran on floppy disk and the software is obsolete now, but his 77 Million Paintings software brings the idea up to date and combines it with visuals. It’s not really personalised, though, even though each performance is unique, because I have no control over it.

I enjoyed the music recommendation engine Pandora while that was available [in Europe], but that’s been closed to people outside the US now because they can’t afford to pay international license fees. Last.fm is a nice recommendation engine, but I haven’t used it too much. I still tend to find new music through magazines, reviews online, friends and gigs.

As with publishing, mass customisation has made it viable for bands to sell their own music on CD from the very start. I’ve bought a few CDs by unsigned bands which probably wouldn’t have existed without the mass customisation and ecommerce technology that was used to create and sell them.

And your book is not just on personalization and customization, but I saw on your website that you also are using a print-on-demand service (Lulu.com) to publish it. So why are you self-publishing 'University of Death', and why are you using print-on-demand?

The main reason for using Lulu as my publishing platform is that it enables me to get the book out there much more quickly. I have friends who have written great books and then spent years trying to get interest from a major publisher, while their books have quietly gone stale. I spent two years writing my novel, and I didn’t want to spend another two traipsing it around publishers who are already inundated with other good books. By self-publishing, I can ensure the book reaches readers much more quickly. Because the book deals with many contemporary themes in the music industry and technology, this was important to me.

For a venture like mine, it makes good business sense. There’s no up-front cost working with Lulu, and I don’t have to store hundreds of copies of the book under my bed or in my garage. The downside is that it’s massively more expensive per copy than it would be to do a conventional print run, but it’s an ideal way to test the market for new creative products. I particularly like Lulu because it takes care of the retail side of things too – it handles the credit card or paypal orders, customer service and support. It helps that Lulu tends to rank well in search engines too. Working with Lulu means I don’t have to be involved in handling individual book sales, don’t have to spend up-front, and don’t have to carry stock. It also means customers can have a smooth and fully supported buying experience.

And where can we buy your book?

Thanks for asking! This book is not available in the shops. You can only buy the book at Lulu.com.

When you place your order at Lulu, they'll print your copy, perfect bind it, stick it in a sturdy cardboard wrapper and post it out to you. This book is not available anywhere else because copies don't exist until they're ordered.

You can download the first two chapters for free through www.universityofdeath.co.uk.

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?

I’m not sure whether it counts as my industry or not, but I’d like to see more done on books. Wouldn’t it be great if I could instruct an intelligent agent to create a book about ‘Pink Floyd’, or even ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, and have it deliver a unique printed artefact to my door? The software could source newspaper clippings and reviews from leading publishers, maybe some blog posts from well-respected fans too. It could sort them into chronological order, and source images from leading photo libraries. It wouldn’t be easy: there’s a whole rights nightmare to resolve, and the micropayments could prove tricky to administer, particularly once you get down to the level of paying freelance journalists. But if the infrastructure was there, the content would follow. And you could create an interface for narrowing the search to something useful (eg, let users specify publication dates, proportion of blog content to newspaper content, number of images etc). Books are still the best way to communicate and digest large chunks of information, but at the moment, there needs to be a significant market for each book to make it commercially viable. That’s because somebody has to do the leg-work of writing each one, and someone else has to market and distribute it. If you want a book about 90s band ‘Kenickie’ (as I do), you’re probably the only one, so you’re out of luck.

We can already do much of the stuff required: we have good search algorithms, there is a lot of tagged content out there, and there are applications that create PDFs on demand, and others that print them in books. We already trust search engines to decide what content we should see online, so this would be an extension of that and would probably work best if restricted to trusted content providers named up-front. It could be a great way for rights owners to make money from archive material and for researchers or enthusiasts to access original reports from the archives.

This is all probably some way off. Still, I can recommend a nice novel to read in the meantime… ;-)

INTELLIFIT Moves From Virtual Fitting (match-to-order) to True Mass Customization: Custom-made jeans with a high-tech twist

Intellifit is know to me as one of the leading providers of match-to-order systems in fashion retail. They currently market a special 3D full body scanner. At a retail location, the consumer enters a see-through "Intellifit Virtual Fitting Room" (the scnanner) that's 8' high and 7' wide. There, low power radio waves collect about 200 accurate body measurements in under 15 seconds – a personal “FitPrint” – while the consumer remains fully clothed. This data is used to match the user's measurements with sizing information of (standard) garments in the store.

According to the company, Intellifit has measured over 230,000 individuals to date, representing the largest sizing database of its kind in the world.

But now Intellifit customers will become enabled to use their profiles to shop for custom made jeans, and in the future, for custom pants, khakis, or shirts. Last week, the company began a test of its “Custom Jeans Center” at its company retail store outside of Philadelphia. Consumers can design their own custom-made jeans with a guarantee of a perfect fit. In the moment, retail shopping is by appointment only and includes consultation with a fashion advisor.

The customer can choose jeans from a selection of styles and washes and add details such as pocket shape and design, stitching and personalization options. The price point of the custom jeans is at about $150.

The FitPrint is transferred electronically from the retail location to the jeans manufacturer, where the garment pieces are custom-cut by computer control. The completed custom jeans are shipped directly to the customer in 3 to 4 weeks.

“This test will help us determine the scalability of the process. With a positive result, an international roll-out will be close behind,” Rob Weber, Intellifit's President, is quoted in a recent press release.

I believe that this combination of mass customization and match-to-order is a very promising way of establishing a sustainable operation. Many consumers do not want to wait for a perfect fit that is just made for them, but also are frustrated by complexity of choice and not finding their right size in a large retail store. Also, if the system finds that a standard item on stock is providing you a good fit, the retailer will have an advantage as the inventory can be reduced. On the other hand, if a consumer does not find a standard garment according to her fit and preferences, she does not have to leave the store without a puchase -- but can be transferred to the mass customization option.

For Intellifit, entering the mass customization market also is a great way to leverage the exiting investments in building such a large database of "FitPrint" customer profiles.

Context:
- For more information and store locations, go to www.intellifit.com.
- MVM's virtual model and Archetype's ZAFU are similar matching-services in the online world.
- Report about METRO's matching and in-store recommendation service

Top 10 Mass Customization Companies in 2007 -- Report in Best Practice Business Blog

Happy New Year!

Best Practice Business is a rather large German blog, and Burkhard Schneider, its main author, recently added more and more good reports on new mass customization companies. If you understand German, very worthwhile to read.

Yesterday, as part of the usual top 10 lists popping up at the end of the year, he also created a list of "top 10" mass customization companies in 2007. There are a number of great concepts, others I find less innovative, other are missing, but it is a great review of interesting concepts in the area. The blog, and the posting, are in German, but you easily will get the picture. Here is the top-10 list (go here for further descriptions and the links)

# Mymuesli: Mass Customized Müsli
# Blends For Friends: Mass Customized Teas
# Vuru – Custom nutrition
# My Twinn - custom dolls
# Miss-Information: Custom travel books
# flattenme: Personalized children books
# TasteBook: Mass Customized recepies
# Paragon Lake: mass customized jewelry
# Cosmocards - Personal Greeting Cards
# Zyrra – mass customized bras

Personalization in Retail: How RFID tags are helping a German retailer to provide customization of the retail experience

Roland Piquepaille wrote in a ZD-Net Blog about RFID tags that help you to choose your clothes at a German retailer close to my home.

This application fits perfectly to the discussion we had at the MCPC 2007 Business Seminar a month ago in Montreal on "A total makeover of retail". Here are some quotes from the posting:

"A German department store, the Galeria Kaufhof in Essen, part of the Metro retailing group, is using RFID technology in a new way. … Men buying clothes in this store will get automatic suggestions. For example, when you go to a dressing room to try a suit, a ’smart mirror’ will tell you what kind of shirt or tie you need to buy with it. Will this technology be deployed elsewhere? Time will tell.

… An RFID reader on a “smart mirror” in the change room determines which clothing has been brought into the room from the RFID tag attached to the apparel, then displays complementary clothing choices or accessories. The system is used in combination with ’smart shelves,’ which can read what merchandise is currently in stock, so that customers can be shown choices in sizes that are available, and in various styles and colors.

… RFID readers are installed in walls, tables, and clothing racks of the men’s department. In addition to providing METRO with data on store floor inventory in real-time, the readers enable a number of consumer-facing applications that METRO hopes will both wow customers and make their buying experience richer and more convenient. The RFID tables are hooked up to an accompanying flat screen, which displays what sizes and styles are immediately available on that table. The RFID mirrors detect which garment the customer is wearing or holding and offer recommendations for complementary items.”

And of course, all this information is extremely valuable to the retail chain. Let’s return to the Baseline article for its conclusion. “Bill Colleran, chief executive of Seattle-based Impinj, says the exciting thing about the Kaufhof deployment is that it demonstrates that RFID can be used in retail for much more than to wring out cost savings in the supply chain. With the use of business intelligence systems like smart mirrors and smart shelves, it can be a new sales driver. ‘People joke that this is the ideal place to start because men need more help” in making choices,’ he says.”

Context information:
- The full blog posting of Roland Piquepaille.
- Report in Baseline Magazine which was the source of Roland's article
- Metro press announcement
- Press release by the technology providers

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)

MCPC 2007 @ MIT -- Program Online: More than 150 Presentations Selected for the MCPC 2007 Conference at MIT

The 2007 World Conference on Mass Customization & Personalization is coming closer. Finally, an overview with all presentations accepted from the "Call for Papers" is available. Just click on the banners below for more information.

Information about the MCPC 2007 Research & Innovation Conference at MIT:

Information about the MCPC 2007 Business Seminar at HEC:

All conference information is at http://www.mass-customization.de/mcpc07/

MCPC 2007 Montreal Business Seminar: An Extreme Makeover of Retail - Program online

Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics, and Mike Gray, Supply Chain Evangelist at Dell, Inc. to keynote MCPC 2007 business seminar

The second part of the MCPC 2007 will be in the form of a business seminar hosted by My Virtual Model, Inc., at HEC Montréal—Canada’s oldest business school. It addresses the application and implications of mass customization and personalization in retail. The business seminar is presented by MVM.com

An Extreme Makeover of Retail

Personalized advertising is transforming marketing, advertising and the media business. Virtual identity, product placement in games and movies, televisions and ads, social shopping and communities are driving and transforming forces in the market. How will merchants, brands and retailers address this new wave of interaction? The business seminar features the new breed of entrepreneurs: investors, advertisers and researchers in E-commerce, gaming industry leaders, TV and movie special effect providers and new media innovators in PDA, iPods, SMS, RSS feeds and even RFID.

Keynote Speakers at the MCPC 2007 Business Seminar

DON TAPSCOTT, Chief Executive of New Paradigm, Adjunct Professor of Management at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

Don is an internationally renowned authority on the strategic value and impact of information technology. He has authored or co-authored eleven widely read books on technology and business, including his most recent Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, which will form the basis of his presentation. He is also the author of The Naked Corporation, Digital Capital and Growing Up Digital.

MIKE GRAY, Supply Chain Evangelist – Dell, Inc. With Dell for over 15 years, Mike is considered an expert on Dell’s unique approach to supply chain management. He has been a lead architect for many of the business processes that allow Dell to achieve its unprecedented levels of inventory while maintaining industry-leading customer service.

Mike Gray is a lifetime Certified Purchasing Manager (C.P.M.) with the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) and is also certified in Integrated Resource Management (CIRM) by APICS, the Association for Operations Management.

Don and Mike’s presentations are framed by four panel presentations. Experts, specialists and leaders scheduled to participate in the "Extreme Makeover of Retail" seminar include:

Sean Belka, Senior Vice President, Online Strategy for Fidelity Personal Investments(FPI), unit of Fidelity Investments

Robert Bonneau, President of Global Wine and Spirits

Lukasz Gadowski, President and Founder of Spreadshirt

Louise Guay, President and Founder of My Virtual Model

Philip Jacob, Founder of StyleFeeder, computer, programs architect and entrepreneur

Kirk Jones, Director, Nike ID Innovation

Michael Kahn, Vice President, Account Manager, double click performics.

Paul Miller, Senior Vice President Direct Commerce Sears Holdings Company

Jacques Nantele, Secretary General, HEC.

John G. Palfrey Jr., Clinical Professor of Law & Executive Director at The Berkman Center for the Internet and society at Harvard Law School

Frank Piller, Researcher & Author, Chair Professor of Management at RWTH Aachen University Germany, and Founding faculty member of the MIT Smart Customization Group

Sean Ryan, CEO of Meez

Christian Stegmaier, Head of Life Style, Reebok International Ltd

Jarmo Suominen, Professor of Mass Customization, Director of the Future Home Institute University of Art and Design Helsinki, Guest Researcher at the MIT.

Marybeth Thomson Luber, General Manager Custom Archetype Solutions Inc.

Paul Trevitchick, CEO and Co-Founder, Parity Communications Inc.

Joshua Young, Product Imaging Operations Manager of Nike Apparel US

Registration for the seminar and much more information here.

Context:

This business seminar is part of the MCPC 2007 World Conference that will take place from Oct 7-10 on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA, USA, and from Oct 10-11 at the HEC Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The MCPC 2007 is the largest event in the field of mass customization and personalization. More information here.

I am the cover star of the latest WIRED issue (and you can be it, too)

New York Times reporter Claudia Deutsch yesterday had a very nice article about the latest WIRED magazine issue. This issue’s cover story is about the growing personalization trend. And to illustrate this trend, subscribers could upload a picture in the last week to the WIRED website which was then digitally printed on their individual issue. A great way to impress your mother in law and get your 15 minutes of fame.

The project was enabled in a cooperation with Xerox who also want to promote their capabilities of high-speed, large volume custom printing (using their iGen3 110 digital production press). There have been many attempts to customize papers and journals according to a user’s individual profile, but that you could appear on the cover of a major national magazine is a new thing.

The NYT article reports about the cooperation between the two companies and has some more information about the production process of the personal cover. And in case you missed this, on the WIRED website, you can still create your custom WIRED cover, but this time in digital form (and their toolkit really is bad, a shame for a technology magazine).

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

Four New Mass Customization Start-Ups Presented by Business Week

In a recent article, Business Week presented a number of new start-ups selling custom products. The report by Eve Tahmincioglu provides some good insight into the costs and backgrounds behind opening a mass customization business. These are the customization businesses presented in the report:

CHIP-N-DOUGH is a local cookie company in Santa Ana, CA. It allows their customer to place corporate logos on the cookie tins. The response has been great: Last year, 30% of the company's $1 million in revenues came from the custom tins. Mrs. Snyder, the founder and owner, went through five programmers and $50,000 just to develop the software needed for customers to place online orders, and also designed the machine to print the custom tins by herself, including own chemicals and dyes which she customized to create proprietary colors. In total, she spent about $300,000 on the changes. Now customers can order between one and 1 million tins online. To date, the largest order has been for 15,000 tins—about 360,000 cookies. Customers can either upload images to the site and design the tins themselves or e-mail the images and leave the rest to Snyder's staff. Tins can be made in as little as one hour—less than the time it takes to whip up a batch of chocolate chip cookies.

ZYRRA was founded by Christi Andersen and Derek Ohly, in Cambridge, MA, to provide women with bras that really fit. The two business partners used $40,000 to modify off-the-shelf costume design software to create a large assortment of prototypes of different bras. On the sales side, Zyrra sells bras through home parties, in which one of the company's three salespeople takes 12 different measurements for each customer. Customers then choose colors and trim. Bras start at $70 and are manufactured in a local factory. The company’s web site is used for marketing and to ask potential customers for their ideas. Re-orders shall be possible online soon.

CHOICESHIRTS is one of the many businesses selling custom shirts. Founded by Matt Cohen in Pennsauken, NJ, it uses a fully automated process that keeps costs low and volume high. Cohen started his company with about $500,000 in personal savings in 2001. He sold stock designs at first, but quickly realized that offering custom designs could set him apart. Cohen upgraded the software on his Web site, working closely with an online development company in which he has an ownership stake. The process took about four months and cost several hundred thousand dollars, most of which went to developing interfaces that connect to back-end administrative and production systems. In 2002, he launched Mother's and Father's Day shirts that customers could personalize with their own or their parents' names.
Today, about 65% of ChoiceShirts' $3 million in revenues came from the custom shirts. And customers of personalized are coming back: About 20% to 30% of ChoiceShirts' business comes from repeat customers.

NAME MAKER is selling high-end gift wrap printed with custom slogans. When Cheryl Dorrell founded the company in 2004, she learned that the existing plotters could produce neither durable nor water-resistant prints. So she designed her own $250,000 machine. They now have five of the machines, and their workings are a closely held secret. Customers place their orders online, but the words are set by hand, part of a nine-step process that takes two weeks. Name Maker's made-to-order gift wrap runs from $24.95 to $32.95 a 12-foot roll. About 15% of Name Maker's $2 million in sales came from customized paper in 2005, and Dorrell expects the product to bring in as much as 65% of sales this year. Not bad for a new niche.

Recent Partnerships and Acquisitions Provide New Infrastructure For Launching Instant Mass Customization Offerings

It gets easier and easier to open an instant mass customization company. You have a great idea or design that you want to offer customized? But you do not want to mess up with manufacturing, fulfillment, or building a configurator? You are either a large existing brand, mass producer, or an individual consumer?

Never mind, a new bunch of mass customization enablers is helping you to set up instantly a mass customization value chain from design to delivery with a few clicks. Well, this is at least the promise of a number of mass customization enablers that can change the mass customization game.

A partnership by DemandMade with Exclusive Pro and the acquisition of Confego by Zazzle (see the previous two postings) have created integrated mass customization fulfillment systems in the US that can be utilized easily to open a MC or personalization business. Leipzig, Germany, based Spreadshirt offers a similar integrated value chain for the custom apparel business, with a smaller solution space, but an even easier interface to create your own mass customization business.

Years earlier, Germany based Human Solutions already have provided a similar integrated supply chain for custom garments including also custom fit and mass-bespoke tailoring. Their system, however, was based on more formal contracts and a traditional franchise system. It was not as easy to set up as your own customization web store at Spreadshirt or Zazzle.

I am curious to see how these ventures will play off and what kind of services will be enabled in the future. It never has been easier to open a mass customization business … what is happening here is the creation of a common infrastructure, think of a mass customization operation system that enables instant companies and user manufacturing in these domains.

So use these capabilities to create your custom world.

Context:
- Mass Customization Enablers I: Zazzle Acquires Confego to Move the Company beyond BtoC Customization Business
- Mass Customization Enablers II: DemandMade & Exclusive Pro Create Partnership to Deliver a Complete Custom Apparel Solution for Online Retailers
- User Manufacturing: The trend and developments

Mass Customization Enablers II: DemandMade & Exclusive Pro Create Partnership to Deliver a Complete Custom Apparel Solution for Online Retailers

Zazzle-Confego is not the only new partnership this spring. Also the second specialized mass customization enabler in the US, DemandMade , announced a new cooperation to provide a seaming less mass customization value chain by integrating product configuration with a domestic factory & fulfillment.

Hermitage, PA, based DemandMade provides technology and managed services for the complete mass customization value chain including consumer brands and retailers who wish to configure and offer personalized or mass customized products and factories who assemble made-to-order consumer products. The company was founded in 2005 by eBusiness veterans Scott Killian and Tim Brule, who pioneered eCommerce outsourcing when they launched FanBuzz in 1996 and the mass customization process CustomFan in 1999. One of the first online applications of mass customization, CustomFan was used to operate successful online merchandising programs for such brands as Coca-Cola, the National Hockey League, Peanuts, ESPN and the 2002 Olympic Games. The pair later sold FanBuzz to the television shopping network ShopNBC in 2002.

Last week, DemandMade has entered into a partnership with Rockford, IL, based Exclusive Pro, a provider of domestic apparel embellishment and fulfillment services specializing in retail programs using mass customization and personalization. Exclusive Pro's capabilities include full-service, single-piece tackle twill processes (twill, felt and leather), embroidery, heat transfer applications and private labeled fulfillment of single piece orders that are produced on-demand.

“We’ve combined a suite of Web-based tools specifically designed for apparel retailers with a domestic factory that is already using our platform to produce and fulfill single-piece orders,” said Scott Killian, DemandMade CEO, in a press announcement. “The result is a comprehensive solution for online retailers who want to launch a customized apparel or soft goods program.”

The combined offer uses an AJAX-based product configuration engine designed specifically for apparel items that online retailers can integrate with their existing online stores to offer personalized or custom apparel products. On the backend, the configurator is integrated with Exclusive Pro’s domestic production and fulfillment facility -- a complete solution that provides retailers with everything they need to launch a custom apparel program.

Terry Taylor, President of Exclusive Pro, says about his motivation to enter this partnership, “We have a long history of producing orders for single piece garments. However, the demand for our services has shifted dramatically in recent years to online retailers where the dynamic nature of these products can best be presented. This partnership with DemandMade effectively ensures continuity between the online experience and the production process.”

To see an example of the new product configurator, visit www.scenicstore.com/example

The Consumer Decides: Nike Focuses Competitive Strategy on Customization and Creating Personal Consumer Experiences -- Data about the Nike Plus Personalization System

During its recent Investor Days, the Nike top management board announced a strong shift of its strategy from being a sportswear brand to becoming the enabler of customized, personal experiences. “Investor Days” are an extensive briefing for analysts; taking place only about every two years (the last was in June 2005). During its recent briefing at the company’s headquarters in Portland on Feb 6, 2007, the company placed a strong focus on its new global theme “The Consumer Decides” and revealed some interesting facts about its customization ambitions and ways to sustainable consumer experience.

During the meeting, also a number of interesting performance data of the Nike Plus system were provided, the Apple-Nike cooperation that allows runners to customize their running experience in a simple but very clever way. It is a strong contrast to the exploding variety Nike is facing today, offering more than 13,000 product different styles in every single quarter.

First, Nike CEO Mark Parker explained the theme “The Consumer Decides”:

“The Consumer Decides is one of Nike's 11 maxims that really define who we are and how we compete as a company. Today, consumers have never held as much power as they do today. They have more choices and more access to those choices. They connect and collaborate with each other over the world. … Clearly, the power has shifted to consumers. For every Nike employee, there's ten million consumers out there deciding whether or not the products and brands we offer really matter. … The ability we have to connect with consumers is the single most important competitive advantage in business today, and nobody does that better than Nike. There is no substitute for connecting with consumers, but it's really just the beginning.”

Nike’s Brand President, Charlie Denson, focused in his speech on the changing consumer and the particular demand for customization:

“[Consumers] want to be part of a community, whether it's a digital community or a virtual community, or whether it's a physical community. They want to feel like they're a part of something. They want to be engaged. …

And another thing that is very, very important to us as we look to the future is the value that the consumer is placing on customization. It's a very, very important part of the way that they interact with anybody or with brands today. We used to talk about the consumer in what we thought was specific, but in today in retrospect, feels like generalities, the fact that we used to put a 18 and a 22-year old in a same set of psychographic, demographic targets. Today, I can very comfortably say that the 18 and the 22-year olds are working on different -- they're living on different planets or at different places. As Mark said, these consumers have more choices than they've ever had.

What our challenge is to keep it simple, make those choices as simple as we can, and make them personal. We've spent the last, or in our case, 20 or 30 years trying to bundle things, adding value to a purchase or a relationship. And now, it's almost in reverse, because you have to unbundle everything if it's going to become customizable.”

During the event, the Nike Plus system was described as a perfect example of this strategy. Trevor Edwards, VP Global Brand & Category Management, describes the system and gives some numbers on its acceptance:

Nike Plus "combines the physical world with the digital world. We put a sensor in the shoe that speaks to the iPod, and you can hear how far you went, how long you went and how many calories you've burned, pretty simple thoughts. And then, when you dock it, you have a world of information at your fingertips. You get to see all that you've done, all your runs stored in a very simple, intuitive web experience where you can set goals for yourself. You can see how you've progressed. In fact, this week, I think we've put up -- you can actually map your run anywhere you go. In addition, you can join in the Nike Plus community where you can challenge your friends or other community members to run physically, but compete virtually. And since our launch, we have close to 200,000 members.

What do the numbers tell us today? First important fact, 35% of the members that we surveyed are actually new to using Nike footwear. So, we've brought more consumers into our franchise. The second part is, more than half of them are actually using the survey to service four times a week. And this is probably the most important statistic, 93% said they would recommend it to a friend, 93%. This is an incredibly sticky proposition, a great way to build loyalty for our brand and obviously build the business.”

Charlie Denson describes the growth plans Nike has with the system:

“That is a dedicated consumer experience. It is changing the game, and it's creating that competitive advantage for us. We would like to see 15% of all runners using Nike Plus, 15%. Now, that's not a very big number, except for there's 100 million people who call themselves runners worldwide. ….”

So in summary, this sounds like a big success and stresses that this really has been a clever idea to provide customization in this industry in a rather simple way, but in one that matters for consumers. And with the target of 15 million users, this would be one of the largest mass customization programs ever.

In another section of the event, Don Blair, Nike’s CFO, provided some interesting figures on the scope of variety that Nike is facing today. I often mention in my presentations the explosion of SKUs and variants that global brands today think to have to offer to create appealing products in heterogeneous markets. Nike seems to have recognized that just increasing the number of variants is not the ultimate way to appeal to consumers:

“SKU productivity. One of the great strengths of our company is our ability to create compelling innovative products that excite consumers. But there can be too much of a good thing. Each quarter we sell about 13,000 different styles of footwear and apparel and because of our high rate of seasonal turnover, we sell tens of thousands of different styles every year. And there are many additional styles that make it part way through the process, but don't end up in the final line that goes to market.

Each one of these tens of thousands of styles drives costs; costs for design, development, sampling, transportation, storage and sales. For footwear 95% of our revenue comes from about 35% of our styles and for apparel the figure is about 40%. …”

Costs of samples to provide this variety were given with more than $100 million. Given these numbers, an adaptable product like Nike Plus or a truly mass customized product, produced on-demand, sounds very appealing and much more efficient.

For the full transcript of the investors meeting, go to nike.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

Interview: Detlef Schoder on the future of the newspaper, personalized printing, and how we can get our daily blog feed into the morning paper

Professor Detlef Schoder is known to me since years as one of the most active German researchers on mass customization. But he also is an entrepreneur and one of the driving forces behind the idea of a mass customized newspaper – a newspaper that is daily personalized according to each individual reader's personal taste and preferences. His company Medieninnovation.com provides technology and consultancy for custom publishing solutions. In this interview, he reflects about today’s state and the future of custom printing.

Prof. Schoder studied business administration in Germany at the universities of Munich and Passau. He obtained both his PhD and Habilitation (Higher Doctorate) from the University of Freiburg, Germany. Professor Schoder has worked not only in Germany, but also in the U.S.A., Republic of Kazakhstan, and Japan. He was an invited visiting scholar at Stanford University, MIT, and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2003 he became Head of the Department of Information Systems and Information Management at the University of Cologne, Germany.

His teaching, research, and project management focus on the economics and management of telecommunications in organizations, especially electronic commerce/electronic business, mass customization, peer-to-peer, ubiquitous computing, and new media management. In the mid 1990’s, he conducted one of Europe’s largest empirical studies on web-based electronic commerce. In addition, he in an adviser for electronic commerce to the German Parliament and consults the European Commission on research projects conducted under Information Society Technologies Framework Programme. Detlef Schoder holds a patent for “an individualized printed newspaper” (WO03052648).

Detlef, can you share a bit about your activities in this custom publishing business?

Our new cross-media product improo provides a synthesis between online and offline world. improo contains articles from high-quality newspapers, which are purchased for reuse, notifications from agencies and contents from our own editorial staff. Furthermore it includes internet elements, e.g. newsgroup messages, RSS feeds and blogs. New qualities are generated through calendar, forecasts and other information, which the reader can customize and add to his newspaper.

How is this idea different to the customized online versions of, for example, The Wall Street Journal?

First of all, improo is not restricted to an online version, but it is delivered as a real printed newspaper (which customers can take everywhere they want). improo provides information taken from many different sources, e.g. high-quality newspapers (like Financial Times, Wall Street Journal), Weblogs, professional journals, or information service providers (like market letter, newsgroups or notifications from eBay or Amazon). At the same time, a customized edition contains only information which meets each individual reader’s demands.

But why do customers want a personalized newspaper? Is not the element of surprise a major part of the enjoyment of reading the morning paper?

Most people are reading always the same sections of their usual newspaper. Day by day, they are overstrained by information overloads and spend a lot of time for filtering and seeking for the right information. Therefore improo saves time and fits the more individualized lifestyle of today’s modern society where people have several very special interests and hobbies. Furthermore improo still contains “surprising” breaking news and some kind of serendipity for this reason. And imagine, if you have much more news likely closer to your interests, or to the interest of your peer group, than -- I believe -- you will have much more surprising news and effects than a general newspaper can usually provide.

Who could benefit from your innovation improo besides the reader?

There is a clear business case. Not only our own studies, but other studies as well predict a market size of several hundred million Euros just in the German-language region. So anyone interested in becoming part of this great venture is invited to approach me for a joint realization :-)

This sounds like a perfect long-tail-application. Given these advantages, why do we not all read a custom paper already? I believe the technology is not the main hurdle anymore.

Technology is only one hurdle besides consumer acceptance and investment barriers. The improo system is a complex one which has to be developed especially for this purpose. Yet there is no product or system comparable to this. Although consumer demand has been approved by a representative survey, such an innovative product requires rethinking and open mindedness. But since people are getting used to customization through customizable internet online portals and news aggregation services, there is already a lot of acceptance. Actually many people already read customized news and retrieve specialty information via internet. A printed individualized newspaper is just the next evident step.

How do media companies and publishing houses react if you discuss your ideas with them?

In several discussions we discovered a wide interest in our individualized news paper. Especially traditional publishing houses suffer from shrinking markets and competition with e-medias. For them improo offers a chance to modernize their business and revive the media industry. However, it is a risky step to try this innovation and – so far- they do not want to take the risk. Others will…

Are there any other good examples of mass customization in the publishing industry?

First approaches to mass customization can be seen in regional/local editions and in books printed on demand. Also, direct mailings often include customized brochures or booklets. Customization in the internet (electronic editions of newspapers) is also common. But there is no publisher who customizes a printed newspaper for individual readers and delivers it to their homes.

Do you see any upcoming trends with regard to new players, technologies, markets, etc. of mass customization in the publishing industry?

As mass customization becomes more popular, new forms emerge, building especially on customer integrated innovation like user generated content. There is a strong demand for localized, specialized and individualized content with high editorial quality and augmented information with additional value like personal market letters or shopping assistants. There is also a new need for intelligent news aggregation. Just think of several millions of blogs out there. Even if only a fraction has high quality content, you still need filtering and customization to read the best and create a high quality of time spent with news.

Your role in the mass customization community is unique as your main job is that of a professor at one of Germany's leading business schools. So how can you connect your professional activities with your academic research? Can you share any recent results of your academic studies?

Yes, of course. The idea to create such a media innovation resulted from my academic research. Also many students and university staff members contributed to the project. Academic and business contacts combine well and I was able to build up a wide network in the areas of publishing, media and mass customization. The research primarily focuses on the acceptance and explanation of mass customized goods. It is evident that users have to invest time, money, and cognitive efforts.

On the other hand there are clear advantages of mass customized products over standard products. We develop integrated models which explain customer behavior and allow for extrapolation of usage patterns. All this is based on large scale empirical surveys and latest multivariate statistical procedures. Thus, academic insight as well as our market research not only advances science but also help to shape market communications and the effective introduction of such a disruptive innovation in the mass market of printed media.

In general, based on your experience both in practice and research, what questions should managers ask themselves when considering to enter the mass customization market?

Is the product suitable for mass customization? Do customers want and understand the value of mass customization? Is the market ready for such an innovation?

Is there a clear benefit of customization which is more than worth the effort? I think this is a crucial question managers should have an answer. Usually, only a market test campaign (piloting) can reveal the answer!

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

This should come at no surprise: A mass customized newspaper. As we hold a bunch of patents in this field, we are at the heart of mass customized printed news. I am very optimistic to hold this innovation one day in my hands!

Contact: Universität zu Köln, Seminar für Wirtschaftsinformatik, insbesondere Informationsmanagement, Pohligstr. 1, 50969 Köln, Germany. Tel.: +49 (0)221-470-5325. E-Mail: Schoder@wim.uni-koeln.de

Information on the mass customized newspaper is available at www.medieninnovation.com

Happy Holiday Greetings - and how OfficeMax helped to elf up my holidays

Merry Christmas and a great start into the new year!

Postings will restart in the new year (with an exclusive interview with B. Joesph Pine, the most popular face behind mass customization -- and also the most knowledgeable one, so come back on January 3, 2007 for this great start of the 2007 MC&OI blogging year).

In the meantime, enjoy the little trick I prepared for you: I just morphed myself into an holiday elf! .

The is a great example of personalization, and OfficeMax really made my day today when I tried this tool. Perfect toolkit, the elf personalization works very smooth (see the great integration between phone and web site when you customize your elf), and it is a fun thing that also drives traffic to their web site. So A+ for this little personalization gimmick.

So now Elf Yourself and have fun during the holidays!

PS: And if you have some spare time during the holidays, plan your speaking proposal for the MCPC 2007 conference!

Donal Reddington on Customerism: Great Analysis of Recent Developments Along the Active Customer

Many of you will know the great blog of Donal Reddington, who regularly reports about developments, company announcements, and new technologies in the mass customization and personalization domain.

Recently, he posted a great feature on "Customerism", explaining different recent trends in business and technology seem to be converging into a new business model, that includes mass customization but also user innovation, crowdsourcing, and other developments.

His main arguments in brief (but read the entire post – there is also a great picture summarizing his thoughts):

Customer Empowerment: "The idea of empowering customers with a higher degree of control over their relationship with business has gained widespread acceptance. Various terms have been devised to describe different approaches or strategies that empower the customer."

The Rise of Mass Customization & History of Product Configuration: "The major impediment to wide adoption of mass customization in the early 1990's was the absence of an efficient communication channel for customers to describe their requirements. But than, the right tools cane up: The Product Configurator. My research suggests that the earliest work on what would be considered a product configurator was carried out by Ron Brachman at Harvard University in 1977. ... In the mid-1980's, Brachman worked at the Artificial Intelligence Principles Research Department at American Telephone and Telegraph (ATT) which developed the PROSE product configuration system for use in the telecoms industry. A few years later, unrelated research by Tim Berners-Lee would produce the first web-browser. By 1996, Dell had combined these two technological innovations into the first web-based product configuration system, that would allow anyone to specify their requirements when purchasing a computer."

Micro-Manufacturing: "The first examples of how mass customization could be the catalyst for new business models came about at the turn of the Century, with the launch of two companies: Zazzle and CafePress. Both of these companies offered conventional personalization of everyday products ... However, the most important aspect of their business was that they were also 'micro-manufacturers'" – allowing creative users to sell their creations to others.

User Innovation: "Ideas about involving the customer in the innovation process had been around since the late 1980's, … devised by Eric Von Hippel at the MIT. Von Hippel discovered that most products and services are actually developed by users, who then give ideas to manufacturers. This is because products are developed to meet the widest possible need; when individual users face problems that the majority of consumers do not, they have no choice but to develop their own modifications to existing products, or entirely new products, to solve their issues."

Crowdsouring as an alternative model of MC: After discussing Threadless etc., Donal concludes: "While to date crowdsourcing has been used mostly in the area of visual design, it could easily be adapted to issues of technical design also. Who is to say that an electronic equipment company could not use crowdsourcing to develop new products? There could be thousands of engineers itching to submit designs for new devices or contribute to the design of a new product. ...

Customerism: This is where we are now then: "A collection of separate business concepts and enabling technologies, that encourage user/customer participation, whose attributes overlap with one another to a significant extent. ... While there is no single word that can take in all of them ('masspeercustomizationcommonsmarketplace' doesn't roll off the tongue!), my personal opinion is that the term 'Customerism' is probably the most suitable word to describe a series of ideas that empower the customer ... "

Great observations and conclusions, again: read his entire post! I asked Donal what motivates him to spend so much time and effort to documenting mass customization and Customerism with this dedication. And his answer was a typical example for the motivation of empowered users in the new market space:

"As regards motivation, I guess you could say it is mainly interest in the topic. I researched MC as part of a master's degree a few years ago. I couldn't use my MC knowledge in my 'day job' (working for the Irish Government), so I set up the website as an outlet to pursue these ideas further. My view at the time was that if I did nothing, my work on the topic would 'go to waste'."

It is only through the great contributions of people like Donal that mass customization is really catching up. There are very few consultants or people who do mass customization professionally that have contributed so much back to the community – and doing this with so much modesty and intellectual generosity. Thank you, Donal!

Why do people want to co-create and to customize?

A new book by Lisa Johnson provides some good answers -- and some great new case studies, too.

Yes, we know today that modern consumers not just want to solely consume, but are active and co-creating and (a few of them) co-innovating – and want just what they want.
But why is this so? This still is one of the fundamental questions – also for companies that want to benefit from “crowdsourcing” or interactive value creation.

To answer it, you either have to rely on heavy sociological texts or studies from anthropologists, or on pretty weak trend assumptions by marketing consultants (I have summarized both discussions in my German MC books).

One of the few exceptions is the great book by Harvard Prof Shoshana Zuboff and her manager husband James Maxmin, “The support economy: why corporations are failing individuals and the next episode of capitalism” (London: Viking Penguin 2002), which contains a great analysis why the (US American) consumer wants more personal service and customized offerings.

The focus of Zuboff and Maxmin are baby boomers, the post-war generation now in its best living and spending age. However, most co-creation activities that are cool in the moment come from younger generations, today 14-to-40-year olds. Also these consumers are savvy, sophisticated, and particular – and they are becoming more and more immune to traditional advertising, while exploring the huge choice of “long tail” markets.

Divided by marketers in the Generation X (30+) and Generation Y (teens and twentysomethings), these groups shape today’s pattern of consumption and value creation. And Lisa Johnson, a marketing consultant, does a great job in her book “Mind your X's and Y's: Satisfying the 10 carvings of a new generation of consumers” (New York: The Free Press 2006) to describe why and how.

What I really liked about this book is that it is all about Web 2.0 and Social Commerce without even mentioning these terms, but bringing them into a more general, better founded and buzzword-free framework.

Her starting point:

“Whether we like it or not, recent technologies have changed how our brains operate. They have altered the way today’s consumers think – not just what they but, but how they buy, how they act and react, and which products and services they find compelling.”

Resulting form this is a different mindset that Johnson calls “the five essential criteria” which describe qualities consumers expect from all kind of products:

- Experience: The desire to get out and try new activities, to explore, text, and see what is possible.

- Transparency: The market as an antispin zone. Full disclosure for companies and consumers alike with accountable choices and decisions.

- Reinvention: Due to fast adaptation of new technologies that allow to do old things differently, markets are a place of constant change.

- Connection: Cooperation of people blending their talents and perspectives to improve the experience for everyone.

- Expression: Anything is possible. The desire to express the layered facets of ones personality and individuality by customization and personalization.

These five criteria inform how consumers operate in the market. And Johnson uses them to describe ten consumer cravings that cross industries and age brackets as they drive – in her opinion – every decision made by members of the Generation X and Y. Let me introduce five of them which seem more relevant for the themes of my blog. While the following quotes describing these trends are pretty much marketing-jargon, their description in the book is actually more profound:

Shine the Spotlight: Extreme personalization gives marketing a new face: "Clamoring for personal recognition. They’re itching to stand out, stand up, and be celebrated with their names in lights (or print or pixels). Brands that tap into this powerful need with highly creative efforts will get not only great buzz, but a whole new level of loyalty and brand ownership to match."

Make Loose Connections: The new shape of “families” and social networks. "This generation is rejecting traditional associations and club-style memberships in favor of loose connections that more accurately reflect their interests, lifestyles and busy days."

Filter Out the Clutter: Editors and filters step into a new role of prominence. "In a world that’s inundated with choices, editing is a critical market phenomenon and an important process in our daily lives. Consumers rely on editors to sift through the raw data and identify the top picks. As a result, many savvy brands are learning to build editing mechanisms into their brands, products, and websites.

Keep it Underground. The rejection of push advertising and the rising influence of peer-to-peer networks. "A select group of people discovers something new, from shoes to bands to politics to neighborhoods, and translates it to satisfy a much wider audience. This is the way of the underground."

Build it Together. Connected citizens explore their creative power and influence change. ".. we’ve only just begun to tap into the power of web-based networks. The Connected Generation is becoming intoxicated by their growing ability to spark change – both as consumer groups and end users. This awareness is spurring mass creativity and launching a power shift away from companies and into the hands of consumers."

And, just for record, the remaining five carvings are:

- Raise My Pulse. Adventure takes its place as the new social currency.
- Give Me Brand Candy. Everyday objects get sharp, delicious, intuitive design.
- Bring it to Life. Everyday activities are orchestrated to deliver a dramatic sense of theater.
- Go Inward. Spiritual hunger and modern media find common ground.
- Give Back. Redefining volunteerism and the meaning of contribution.

Regarding her first trend, Shine the Spotlight and Extreme Customization, she provides a number of good arguments why consumers want this kind of customization and expression of their personality – regarding the need for (mass) customization especially for product offerings that address aesthetic design and personalization:

- People are burned out. “Consumers are cynical and extremely educated about the entire marketing process. Add in a collective obsessions with celebrities, and people everywhere are longing to experience the insider treatment. They want to feel like someone really cares about their dreams and desires.”

- People have seen what is possible. New tools and websites allow consumers to share their unique personalities.

- There’s a sense of entitlement. “I deserve it and I am ready for it now, is the common attitude.

- People want profile in familiar formats.

- People want promotion without the appearance of self-promotion.

To illustrate this trend, Ms. Johnson uses a number of case studies which I personally find not too extreme or convincing, there are much better examples out there (like the new Adidas Pars Innovation Lab, DNA Style Lab’s idea or Build-a-Bear): Jones Soda that allows you to place personal labels on standard soda, Iamtoy.com, who create handcrafted superhero alter egos of your loved ones, DNA Artwork that uses your DNA for a custom picture. But you ge the point.

Among the many other, much better case studies in the remaining chapters of the book, is the venture of an active member of our mass customization community: Andreas Schuwirth (http://www.xxpo.de), who developed a body measurement solution for the bike market that allows a totally new sales experience there. The book describes in large detail the application of this system in a new chain of bike stores in the US, "roll:bike". These stores are envisioned by an industry outside, Stuart Hunter, who wants to provide customers a custom shopping experience with a highly edited and customer-centric store. The book describes here a great case study of an offline-customization (matching) system that really provides customer value.

What the book is missing, however, are all forms of co-creation that go beyond operational marketing or improvements of merit, but which do address topics like lead users or other forms of user innovation (Patty Seybold’s book does a better job here). Ms. Johnson stays in the traditional regime of thinking – but this is also where most co-creation activities do take place anyway.

I could go on with quoting from this book, but just recommend that you get a copy and read it for your self.

Offline Customization -- Morgan Miller Fashion Shoe Workshop in South Beach, Florida

Madeforone today discovered the link to an interesting story in the Miami Herald about another off line experience for footwear customization.

So to continue the stream of posting around this theme, here some extracts from the Miami Herald article. For me, the entire concept sounds very much like the Via Della Spiga Concept store of watch maker Swatch where consumers also can co-create (craft) their own custom watches in a store (see old posting on Swatch's customization store). I believe that there is still much growth potential in this business model.

So this is what you can do – since Nov. 1, 2006 -- in Miami at Morgan Miller (1634 Euclid Ave., Miami Beach, 305-672-6658), a customization boutique owned by Morgan Miller, 24, a graduate of Marymount Manhattan College with a bachelor's degree in communications:

“Ever find a pair of strappies you loved, except the straps were all wrong Now you can design your own—from the heel up—at Morgan Miller, a unique design-and-go shopping experience that takes only 30 minutes. At 24, designer Morgan Miller, owner of the new South Beach boutique, has put an innovative, rock star spin on the shoe-glutton movement.

''We provide the ingredients for women to be their own designers so they are able to put their own stamp on things,'' said Miller, a New Jersey native. Clients choose from a mélange of soles, straps and buckles to create a shoe exactly to their liking, at prices ranging from $150 to $500.

There's a buffet of kitten heels, cork and wooden wedges of various altitudes and attitudes. There are high heels, low heels and chunky heels in black or white lacquer. Straps can be had from more than 100 options, including lizard, python, ostrich, alligator, leopard-print hide and the leathers: patent, metallic and pearlized. Buckles can involve Swarovski crystals or faux bamboo Strap and buckle samples are attached with Velcro to a wall of black velvet so clients can handle all their options. And once the style combos are chosen, bubbly is served and the foot is measured.”

Another website, Daily Candy , describes the customization process:

Step 1: The base. Stiletto, kitten heel, cork platform — she’s got you covered, from beach to banquet.

Step 2: The strap. Go conservative with black or sex things up with turquoise python — there are plenty of fabrics and colors to choose from.

Step 3: The accessory. You’ve got more than 100 options: Bling out with crystals and jewels or keep it simple with a silver chain or nothing at all. Of course, you’re not expected to actually make the shoes. The in-house cobblers take care of that.

But in the end it is all about the experience, as the Miami Herald writes:

The boutique resembles a candy store for grown-ups. Big candy jars hold rhinestones and other embellishments. Crystal chandeliers illuminate the sparkling shop. The shoes, which can resemble those by Jimmy Choo, arrive a mere half-hour later—on Tiffany & Co. silver platters. ... A self-confessed shoe freak, Miller plans to expand her made-to-order shoe business to include handbags and belts, but with a longer turnaround of two-three weeks.

Context information: Previous postings on offline customization stores:
- Adidas Paris miAdidas flagship store
- Selve Footwear Customization Experience
- DNA Style Lab
- Korean iFashion project with virtual mirrors
- Personalization Stores collection- at CS Scout
- Via Della Spiga Concept store Posting in old newsletter

DNA Style Lab goes Beta: A new model for the custom t-shirt economy that also looks beyond the internet

If the number of new ventures started around one idea is an indicator for the strength of this trend, then custom t-shirts and related fashion items are the hottest area of mass customization in the moment. I lost track of all the recent announcements of new sites where users can co-design their t-shirts. Next to "established" forerunners like Spreadshirt, Cafepress, or Threadless numerous start-ups entered the customization world recently. Have a look on Adam Fletscher's t-shirt blog to get an overview in form of his great interviews with the founders of the players in this custom t-shirt economy.

So just let me introduce you to one of these upcoming sites: DNA Style Lab, the brainchild of Samantha McDermott, who got first experience with customized handbags in the late 1990s. Her idea is to combine elements of some of the existing systems of the custom t-shirt economy with new ideas.

The core idea is that the company commissions a number of artists from around the world. These artists are in varying stages of their careers, some are already more established, others are just getting known. Artists will contribute design elements which consumers than can place freely on different apparel products and accessories. Pricing of the products is modular: the more graphic elements an user selects, the more expensive the final product gets.

If artists allow, consumers can also change certain aspects of the supplied art. The company itself makes its profit from selling the core products (US $10-20 for American Apparel garments), artists get the full price users pay for the graphic elements they select (about $5).

Sounds very much like Stagr or Innertee ... sites which do not leave the entire co-design process in the hands of the consumer but propose to split the process: Experts provide the input and variety by basic designs, individual consumers get the freedom to combine these elements, providing them the experience but not the pain of a co-design process.

But what makes Ms. McDermott's venture really special is her plan to stay not just in the online world, but to move also to brick & mortar stores where customers can actually leave the store with an item they designed. I think this is what it requires to grow and scale the idea of aesthetically customized fashion products. In the end, the major value of a custom t-shirt or similar product is not additional ergonomic value due to better fit or function, but the hedonistic value of experiencing the co-design process itself and the rewarding feeling of the final product.

Mass customization pioneer Nike also discovered that just offering custom shoes online is not enough and thus opened its NIKEID Lab in New York's Elizabeth Street, and Puma even started offline with its great Mongolian BBQ. And one of the largest mass customizers – and a real role model for me – Build-a-Bear, has founded its fantastic growth story entirely on offline customization, selling in the end more the process of customizing a toy than the custom product itself.

Given the joy of shopping for fashion products for many consumers, a business model based on providing co-design in an offline environment could become a large success. There are some local players in this area (like Neighborhoodies in New York or George&Frank in Munich), but not really scalable and thought-though system that could replicate Build-a-Bear's success in the toy industry for the fashion industry.

For a start, however, DMA Style Lab is still an online business only. Its present toolkit is obviously very beta and demands a few minutes to learn, but then is easy to operate. The company told me that this will be improved very soon, including the order taking process. But you get already a good idea about the basic elements of the concept: The main focus today is on the artists who provide the work. This is a great combination of the co-design trend with its countertrend: strong orientation at external peers and idols.

They will be adding a "Soundlab" function soon -- discover independent artists (bands) so that you can listen to their music while designing you new t-shirts. As with all of these sites, functionalities to support the community of users and artists are crucial for success. Here, the usual tools like customer pages, upload of user photos, sharing of designs, forums, etc. will be implemented.

I am curious to see how these ideas will come into place and which segment of the market DNA Style Lab will be able to capture. The traditional market for custom graphic t-shirts (fashionable late teens and young tweens) has been occupied by the existing labels (many of them working in the traditional way without any customization). But Samantha McDermott and DNA Style Lab may be able to create a new market of custom customers, older and perhaps more sophisticated, also more interested in art than in music.

Context information: Here are some links to recent news around the custom t-shirt economy:

- Innertee (see my previous post) went beta last month
- STAGR plans to allow the customization of top brands (Great three-part interview on HipHipUK)
- And (if you speak German) a collection of recent posts on Exciting Commerce on Custom T-Shirts and related products,

Custom Credit Cards: Mass Customization in the Banking Industry

Springwise today featured a nice new custom-banking product: Custom credit cards. Mass customization in the banking sector is one of the hottest trends in the area. Surprisingly, above much talk, not much has happened yet.

Credit cards seem to lead the industry. The idea of custom credit cards is pretty old. But in most cases, it is just an extension of the custom personal cheque, featuring your pet, grad-daughter or president (for example at www.uniquechecks.com).

Turkey-based Garanti Bank however has extended this idea. With its Flexi Cards does not only allow customers to personalize the look of their bank cards, but also to develop the entire own banking product.

"Flexi Cards are Visa cards that let the cardholder make a few key decisions, allowing them to set over ten parameters. When applying for a card, customers can manipulate variables like reward rates and types, interest rate and card fee. The rewards system is especially flexible, not only letting customers determine reward ratio and type (cash or points), but also enabling them to choose which payments will earn them extra rewards: whether it are broad categories like restaurants, or specific stores like Zara.

Interest rate, bonus rate and card fees are selected by sliding bars that render various combinations of rates and fees. Card fees, for example, can be pushed back to zero by committing to a monthly spending minimum. A lower interest rate leads to a lower bonus rate, etc. Lastly, after making serious decisions about financial terms, customers can design their own card, choosing from different colors and a gallery of images, or uploading their own image. There's even the option of picking a vertical card, which is a world's first for Visa."

A very similar idea (based on a Mastercard) was introduced already in 2002 by the UK company Royal and Sun Alliance. Their MORE THAN credit card also provided their customers the opportunity to create their ideal credit card. Customers could choose their own APR, cashback, servicing options and annual fee to suit their needs as they change over time. I have featured this example since years in my presentations, but just had to learn that the company stopped this offering. Reasons unknown.

But the concept itself promises many opportunities:

"While customers appreciate being in control and creating a tailor-made card, inside and out, the bank is able to test various value propositions, gaining valuable insights into which customer segments choose which options. Self-segmentation through ultra-personalization. ;-)"

I couldn't say it better than the guys at Springwise! If you know interesting other concepts of mass customization in banking, let me know!

MC&OI Interview: Jan-Christoph Goetze from Personalnovel about custom love stories, on-demand printing and how his business just democratized an idea from the 15th century

Here is number two of my new series of interviews with pioneers from the mass customization community (to the first interview). Jan-Christoph Goetze is founder and CEO of PersonalNOVEL, a German mass customization site that allows its customers to create a truly individual book: One in which they and their friends or loved ones are the main actors. On its website Personalnovel.de, the company offers a wide selection of titles, ranging from Romance Novels, Adventure, Mystery, Sci-Fi to Detective stories.

Personalization is possible for the leading characters, their physical appearance in terms of hair color, eye color and, in the more intimate romance novels, also their perfume and pet names. A personal dedication and a variety of additional attributes, depending on the book, as cars, ships, friends, villains and places contribute to a unique experience. Using latest digital print-on-demand technology, the books are produced by an external partner in paperback, hardcover or even leather cover. Additional features are individualized covers and titles.

Before moving into custom publishing and founding PersonalNOVEL in 2003, Mr. Goetze worked as an architect with Murphy/Jahn in Chicago, Il, Berlin and Munich, after finishing his Master of Architecture at Cornell University, Ihaca, NY.

Mr. Goetze, how did you develop the idea to launch PersonalNovel? Was this your first encounter with mass customization?

Based on several observations, the idea of creating PersonalNOVEL was driven by the goal to let everyone become the star of a book. Another approach was to stress the limits of digital printing and the opportunity to create industrially produced individual copies in volumes of just one book. Exploring the technical limits was also my first encounter with mass customization -- and apparently a lasting one.

Can you describe briefly the process how your books are developed, configured, and produced?

All our featured books are written exclusively for PersonalNOVEL. We developed a guideline how the text is written to have a good balance of personalized and not personalized content. Our authors come from a wide array of backgrounds and have mostly published with other houses as well.

The submitted text will be formatted, proofread and fed into our specifically developed software which allows us to format the books the way the customer has ordered it. The software itself is not only restricted to generating text, but also features our customer relationship management.

Once customers have chosen a title from our vast selection, they enter the questionnaire containing names, characters and so on. While they enter their information, they can read the resulting personalized text in real time. The next remaining five steps allow our customers to configure the book with features like a personal dedication, fonts and binding or cover options.

Our associated print shop prints the formatted books on digital printing equipment every weekday. Paperback books are usually shipped the next day, hardcover and linen books three days later.

What are the achievements with PersonalNovel you are most proud of?

The most exciting aspect about PersonalNOVEL is the high level of customer satisfaction. People seem to be extremely thrilled by reading their name in a completely customized story.
At this point we created a good base of customers, we are providing a reliable and quick customer support, it is fairly easy to generate a book and our quality in content and output is improving more and more – so PersonalNOVEL has become a wonderful source for personalized books.

Due to our good reputation [and a press coverage that should envy every PR manager; FTP] big publishing houses are approaching us. We just signed the first contract with one and are discussing new projects with others.

What are the reasons of your customers to purchase a personalized book? Do you think there are limits of your business due to a novelty effect, meaning that once the idea of a personalized novel is known in the market, the appeal of this product will diminish?

PersonalNOVEL’s books are mainly used as gifts and it is an interesting question what limits our product is facing. I don’t think it has any appeal to the mass market, because it takes quite some effort to generate your own book. PersonalNOVEL might take advantage of a certain novelty effect but I assume we will always have a certain group of customers enjoying the idea.

Are there any other good examples of mass customization in the publishing industry?
And do you see any upcoming trends with regard to new players, technologies, markets, etc. of mass customization in the publishing industry?

Maybe personalized mailings, calendars or postcards as the basic predecessors; but quite frankly I couldn’t think of any, since there aren’t too many applications around anyway.
Since we are currently developing a few new ideas which also might become real products I am sorry to pass on this one. Interesting samples for customized products are the printed versions of Wikipedia or a customized travel guide book.

Why do we have not more customization of books, journals or newspaper yet? It seems to me that, from a technology point of view, this industry is far ahead of others. What prevents companies to exploit the capabilities of digital printing for more customization?

I make a distinction between personalization and mass customization in the publishing industry. Customization configures data according to the profile of the customer, like a Wikipedia encyclopedia about medieval history or a guide book limited to restaurants in Tuscany, both chosen from list of article components in a database. Personalization means to incorporate the customer into the content itself. That’s the reason why a personalized journal or newspaper contradicts its name.

Mass customized print products, weather books or newspapers, share the fate of being produced in small volumes and are rather expensive compared to usual products. Their value to customer is that they fit their customers' interest, while a PersonalNOVEL stars the customer himself.

Another reason could be that for reading newspapers and journals, one might enjoy the wide array of topics being offered compared to a customized product which limits a reader to her selection.

In addition, Publishers that want to offer personalization face a barrier of entry: Their current distribution is limited to bookstores (on- and offline) and they do not have neither customer support nor customer interaction which is crucial in this business. So a publisher would have to enter a new market which is not his core business -- and that’s why he is better advised to work with specialists like our company.

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?

If we turn back the pages a couple of centuries we encounter the roots of mass customization: manufacturing and handcrafting. In the old days everything like shoes and shirts were produced by hand and therefore unique. When Gutenberg invented the book press in the 15th century many books, especially bibles and other religious prints, got personalized covers accustomed to their owners like kings, lords and so on. So even 500 years ago a very limited number of people could enjoy customized and personalized books. Our achievement is that today everybody can afford a PersonalNOVEL.

Contact Jan-Christoph Goetze at info@personalnovel.de.

This is so long tail: Newly Launched ZAFU.com Helps Women With Personalized Jeans Recommendations to Find their Perfect Jeans

Personalization as a more scalable alternative to mass customization?

Many women I know share this experience: Looking frustrated at thousands of jeans listed on a search engine, or carrying a pile of denim into a changing room – just still to find not the jean that really fits. ZAFU.com. a new venture by Archetype-Solution's Rob Holloway, wants to provide help – and is the perfect example of an application riding the long tail.

Remember (see post from July 28) that the idea of the now bestselling "The Long Tail" book by Chris Anderson is that today there are (a) unlimited choice and variety, (b) more consumers that want to utilize this variety to find a better fitting product, (c) large profit opportunities for companies not focusing on a few large blockbusters or hit products but on helping customer to explore this variety.

Anderson's book focused on long-tail-applications in the digital sphere, music, books, and movies. But zafu.com brings this into the world of apparel.

CNN described in a press coverage Zafu's concept quite well:

"Sizing jeans to the myriad shapes of women is a challenge even in a department store dressing room, let alone online. Zafu.com, launched this week, arrives as the industry shifts from years of marketing baggy or flare-cut jeans to a skinny silhouette that is much harder to size and wear. "We've taken the trouble to actually measure and check the jean and try it on people to see how it really fits," Chief Executive Rob Holloway told Reuters. "We are the friend in the dressing room, I guess."

Zafu asks women shoppers 11 questions about how they prefer jeans to sit on their hips or waist to create a body profile. That alone is a departure from the incongruous body-type descriptions of "pears" or "triangles" found in fashion magazines and retail catalogues.

The results are used to match the user with as many jeans as could suit them from a database of hundreds of styles, from broadly marketed Gap to pricey Seven, then link them to a retailer to purchase."

In a recent phone conversation with Rob Holloway, he described the laborious process it took them to set up this fit database. They invited hundreds of women in their offices, each woman hat to try on 32 different jeans, all fits being evaluated by the company's own apparel experts. This gave them both information about women's shapes and figures and information about the cuts and fitting secrets of dozens of different jeans brands. To update this information, Zafu has created a streamlined process so that new models can easily being integrated into their database and assortment.

Correct sizing is one of the biggest obstacles to the growth of online apparel and footwear sales, which are expected to rise in the US to $13.8 billion this year from $11.3 billion a year ago, according to tracking firm Shop.org data. Almost 14 billion sounds a lot, but is only 6 percent of total U.S. apparel and related sales.

The jeans market is an interesting market segment. Market research firm NPD Group reports women's jeans sales reached $7.8 billion for the 12 months through March 2006 -- a 10.8% increase over the $7.04 billion reported during the same period a year ago. This data is on top of a 13.7% growth rate of jean sales between 2004-2005. Much of this growth comes from new jeans models and niche designer brands – offering more choice and options, but making the entire selection process also more difficult for women to navigate.

CNN quotes Ellen Tolley Davis of Shop.org saying "Many consumers still want to touch and feel merchandise before they buy it. When it comes down to particular sizing for shirts and pants, there's still some room for retailers to make improvements."

This is exactly what Zafu does. They also provide a service that you will get not from many retail associates: Zafu's web site will tell you also when there is NO jean at all in their assortment to fit your body – asking you to postpone your purchase.

Zafu will tell the consumer outright and suggest she check in periodically as styles are updated. "We wondered, should we be completely honest here and show someone zero [results] or fiddle a bit," said Holloway.

They decided to be honest – and this is exactly where the value of such an intermediary comes from. But according to their estimations, their assortment of analyzed and databased jeans is already large enough to provide an exact fitting jean for 94% of all consumers. And loosing this 6% of sales (theoretical) is a good price to pay to show to the other users that they are really serious and honest about fit! Early users of the service seem to love it a lot, as this customer review suggests.

Zafu also allows women to save their profile making the process even easier next time they return. This helps them also to inform customers when a new jean is added to their assortment that exactly fits their body style. However, if a user does not want to leave any data, she does not have to do register etc.

And how does Zafu make money?

First, there are provisions for each sale. Zafu does not carry any inventory, but directs customers directly to the web sites of affiliated retailers and gets the usual commissions between 5-20% of each sale.

Second, they will provide in-house fit recommendation services to online and offline retailers, helping the customers of just one brand to navigate the assortment in a store or online shop better.

Third, I believe there is a lot of potential to extend the service to other product categories, becoming the one-stop style adviser for women with regard to fit. This could also provide some nice aggregated market research data, another potential source of revenue. For this, a cooperation between My Virtual Model and Zafu would be a perfect option.

For me Zafu is also an interesting business model as it provides another alternative to real mass customization. Zafu's parent company, Archetype, launched in 2003 a fit consulting business that provides mass customization services to some of the leading apparel retailers and brands in the US, including Land's End's Mass Customization business.

Zafu's personalization service is an alternative model. It may not have the inventory advantages and value prepositions of mass customization, but provides a much more easy to implement and much better scalable system. The future will show where there is more value for customers. I believe that both models will work hand in hand and supplement each other: For most consumers, a better matching service as zafu.com will provide sufficient value. For others, however, the ultimate product will still be the truly custom jean -- providing not only perfect fit, but also all the hedonic satisfaction connected with a custom product.

Updates: "Customized online fashion finally clicks with consumers": A journalist tests zafu.com (and competitor myshape.com) [Thanks to madeforeone.com for this link]

Report on Internet-Retailer (Nov 7, 2006): Shopping.com, a large shopping portal, has partnered with zafu.com to launch a women’s jeans finder on the shopping engine. The new feature, accessible under a link from women’s clothing category pages on Shopping.com, carries shoppers who click on it to a co-branded web site that guides them through the process to yield a selection of jeans and then links to the merchants where they may be purchased. The feature exposes shoppers using it on Shopping.com to brands they might not have previously known about or considered, but which might be a fit for them. “By suggesting new brands, styles and fits for shoppers, Shopping.com can offer them more relevant choices via a recommendation expressly tailored for them,” the company notes.

Update (20 Nov 2006): The New York Times had a good review of Zafu.com. on Nov 20, 2006 While the article in general praises the Zafu service, it remarks that it does not weigh heavily enough a user’s brand preference. But the label of a jeans is a as a big factor as the fit.

Personalization and Music: Beyond shuffling on your Ipod -- an overview of new services to customize your music experience

What we can learn from the BBC, Pandora, and Musiclens for mass customization

The traditional compilation CD is deader then ever. Instead of listening to all songs of an entire CD, most consumers today prefer just to listen to what they want on their MP3 players (a typical long tail phenomenon). But selecting, filling and arranging the playlists of these players have stayed more or less a craft business. While some persons feel joy and achievement once they have generated their very own, individual playlist, this is, none the less, plenty of work. Also, listeners are restricted to the music they known (and, more or less, own).

Sure, with satellite radio, there are now highly focused radio stations which substitute general radio broadcasts. But often, even these stations are still a bit too broad and contain songs that you don't really like too much – and too few of your real favorites.

Here, three new services provide help. Using different approaches, they allow users to customize their music experience beyond the restrictions of ownership, information about favorite songs, and the demand to manually craft a custom playlist. These services provide tools to find new music matching an individual's preferences, but also enable custom broadcasting services of a new level.

Note: I am not talking here about the option of customizing the particular song. While there are some new promising offers (e.g., at http://www.dabreakupsong.com you can create a custom rap song to break up with your partner :-), this is a minor field of application (see my posting on this subject). Most people don't want to customize their music on the level of the single song, but they want to personalize the stream of songs they listen.

BBC to Develop Personalized Radio Service

Madeforone recently reported about a new personalized radio service that the BBC is developing. The UK state broadcaster wants to allow audiences to create personal radio stations from its content, its director general has said. The service, provisionally called MyBBCRadio, aims to give audiences more control by combining existing services such as podcasts and the BBC Radio Player. It will be part of the BBC’s iPlayer, a new interface device that shall transport custom content (music, video, reportings) to each user.

With its earlier Backstage offering, the BBC has been a forerunner of user-generated content. It changed its policy from protecting its content to giving most of it away to listeners for free, allowing users to create new works by mixing their own stuff with BBC programming (more information here). NNC Backstage, however, was more an offering for leading-edge users or music lovers. But the new MyBBC Radio Service wants to bring this capability to the mainstream.

Radio 2.0: Pandora and the Music Genome Project

But personalized radio stations do already exist. Once of the best services is Pandora, a music discovery service designed to help users find and enjoy music that they like. Based on a huge database that has categorized songs of over 10,000 different artists based on unique attributes, it helps users to find music that has the same characteristics of a song or artist they like. Just type in a name of a favorite song or artist, and let the magic begin. I was highly fascinated by the quality and scope of the resulting personalized music stream (you need an US ZIP code to use this service, if you live abroad, just use 02138, my postal code).

Pandora has a totally different approach to configuration compared to the majority of other configuration toolkits. It is a good example of a need-based system, i.e. an expert system that does not demand that users can describe exactly what they want, but that just analyses what they like and provides suggestions based on this analysis.

The service is powered by the Music Genome Project. In this project, founded by Tim Westergren in January 2000, a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating a comprehensive analysis of music. They assembled hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large "music genome". Taken together these genes capture the unique and musical identity of a song -- everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, singing, and vocal harmony.

This kind of expert analysis of all songs provides the main difference of Pandora to other music recommendation systems based on collaborative filtering (as, e.g., at Amazon.com). Collaborative filtering works without any idea of the nature of the articles it is recommending, as it is solely based on comparing the usage (shopping) behavior of one user with the behavior of other users. Pandora, on the other hand, is not based on such a analysis, but solely on the nature of the products (songs) it recommends.

Pandora is offered for free in an advertising supported version (and of course the company hopes to get a provision when you buy a song you discovered though its service). There is also a subscription based service without advertising. All music is streamed, this means it is not possible to download or safe the stream (legally). With a special device, you can also listen to your very personal music channel without your computer.

More information and analysis: http://blog.pandora.com/press/

MusicLens: Configure Your Music

Now compare Pandora to MusicLens.de, a German project that aims to test four different technologies to analyze music like it has been done in the Music Genome Project. However, this service opens the Pandora box and allows you to really configure the music you like. Using more than 10 sliders, you can describe exactly the music you want to hear, like its tempo or subjective volume. You can also define the purpose of the music on a scale from listening over driving and sex to dance. And set the mood of the song (on a scale from smile to angry).

As a result, you get a play list with songs matching your desires. Sounds too complicated? You also can just provide a favorite song for the start, see its characteristics, modify them just a bit, and get new music. As this is a test project, however, the music available does not match the scale and scope of Pandora's repertoire. But the web site provides already a good indication of the service.

MusicLens uses a fuzzy search technology to find music - CDs, albums, song titles or artists - by characteristics. Searches can be carried out in large masses of data quickly and effectively. And, despite the terms of the enquiry being vague or indefinite, the results are clear. The idea is to provide users also good results when they do not know what they are looking for – a feature conventional search engines do not have. Users also do not need to use specific search vocabulary or any form of literal definitions. The search is conducted by way of various characteristics or categories, represented by the slider navigation system.

DDD-Systems, a Hamburg based IT services company that is behind MusicLens, hopes to position the system also as a business-to-business service. The search technology shall assist those involved in purchasing film, radio or television content to find the right content.

Beyond segments and clusters

Why do I write about all this? In my opinion, MyBBCRadio, Pandora, and MusicLens provide some great general insights for mass customization:

-- These services overcome the traditional categorizations (market segmentations) of music in genres. There are no clusters of "Independent", "Pop", or "Rock" music. All categorization is based on an individual user's preferences and desires.

-- Pandora and MusicLens apply modern search technologies which support a need-based configuration approach. Instead of today's dominating parameter-based configuration approach (users configure products based on concrete selections of components and modules), they help to define products based on a description of the user's needs and preferences.

-- They address the customization of services. Up to today (and also in this blog), mass customization is often solely discussed in relation to the individualization of physical products. MyBBCRadio, Pandora, and MusicLens are great examples of mass customization of service offerings.

But for now: Enough words, now go ahead and listen to your personal music.

User Profiles: How the Higgins Project can prevent mass confusion in mass customization and enable a new generation of virtual identity services

How a new initiative, the HIGGINGS project, wants to give users full control over their profiles, and what this means for better mass customization businesses.

Asked what is the genus of mass customization, I always answer customer co-design. A custom product can only be provided if the manufacturer has specific information about the demands of each particular customer. In most cases, this information is provided by an explicit act of co-design in which customers choose between options or create a configuration within a given solution space.

The problem of mass confusion

This co-design process, however, is also the reason of mass confusion, a reason why consumers often abandon a mass customization purchasing process. Mass confusion has two major reasons:

Burden of choice: One limit of mass customization is that excess variety may result in an external complexity. Users might be overwhelmed by the number of options.
Matching needs with product specifications. In addition, customers often simply lack the knowledge and skills to transfer their personal needs and desires into a concrete product specification. A pair of sport shoes becomes a rather complex product if one has to decide explicitly between different widths, cushioning options for the insole, patterns for the outsole, and color options.

The premier task of the design of co-design toolkits (configurators) is to prevent mass confusion. A premier measure for this is a starting solution so that customers do not have to start from the scratch. In a good mass customization system, there will be a pre-configuration which represents already a full configuration and which customers can modify according to their wishes (the factory121.com web site provides a good example).

To generate starting solutions, manufacturers could present a number of "standard" products (as in the case of Factory121), not connected to the individual customer. An even better way though is to customize also the starting solution according to each customer's preferences: If the Factory121 website would know that I find a particular class of watches ugly, it would present me more choices of other models. It may even present me starting solution with watches in my preferred colors, or those of my wife.

But the prerequisite for customizing the configuration process is that the vendor possesses knowledge about my preferences. If I am a returning customer, this should be the standard situation (coined "learning relationship" by consultants Peppers & Rogers). For first-time customers, however, the provision of a good starting solution is a more challenging task.

Virtual identity: The dream of the universal user profile

The optimal situation would be if the vendor could draw on an existing profile of my preferences, generated by shopping and configuring at other companies in the past, but also fine-tuned by my own feedback and demands. Such a profile would contain information about past purchases, configurations, measurements, allergies, socio-demographical data, and, of course, address and payment data. Another element of such a profile could be my previous search terms at Google and alike, representing the "Database of my intentions", as John Battle has called it in the great book "The Search" .

In short, such a profile would represent my (virtual) identity. This idea of such a unique user profile, representing the identity of a customer, is pretty old and has been discussed many times in the context of personalization and customization. And there were many commercial attempts to generate and manage such a universal user profile, like Firefly, Microsoft passport, or Sun Microsystems-led Liberty Alliance. All failed due to missing trust by users: You may trust Amazon to build such a profile of your media preferences supporting its recommendation engine, but most users do not trust Microsoft to build such a profile for their entire personal lives.

How the Higgings Project can help

At this place, a new project may provide help: The Higgins Project (http://www.eclipse.org/higgins), managed by the Eclipse open source foundation, aims to give people more control over how their personal information is used online and aims to develop so-called 'user-centric' identity management. Rather than big corporations managing identity data, the user-centric identity management approach puts individual users in the driving seat. They shall be able to decide what information they want shared with trusted websites that use Higgins-derived software. The project is supported by a large rooster of companies, including Dell and Microsoft. IBM, Harvard's Berkman Centre for Internet & Society, Novell, and Parity Communications all said they are contributing already code to the project.

As John Leyden reports, Higgins breaks a person's identity into pieces, allowing users to dictate who can access parts of their identity information, within applicable privacy guidelines and laws. Organizations using applications built with Higgins open source tools can share specific identity information, such as their telephone number or buying preferences, according to rules set by the individual.

This set-up will also help users to integrate identity, profile, and relationship information across multiple systems. Using service adapters, systems such as directories, collaboration spaces and email systems can be plugged into the Higgins framework. Users thus could change an address across all their online accounts more easily or delegate who can see which parts of their body measurements, for example. The only cross-vendor application working (very successfully, but proprietary and challenged by many constraints) is the Virtual Model from My Virtual Model (Full disclaimer: I am on the board of this company).

The result is a system to manage the digital identity of a user. Digital identity management are seen at the forefront of next generation web services – enabling finally the ideas of personalization and customer centricity we envisioned in our mass customization community for more than a decade.

If Higgins is successful and adopted by mass customizers, this will mean a large boost for mass customization. New research has clearly shown that mass confusion and the burden of choice are major obstacles of mass customization – preventing consumers to adapt this strategy. It would make so much sense to get a 3D body scan, if I could transport this data from one vendor to another, but still owning and controlling the use of this data by myself. And this would be just the beginning.

Identity Mash-Up: A conference on reusing identity profiles and information

The possibilities and business strategies enabled by digital identity management systems like Higgins are explored in the conference Identity Mash-Up at the MIT Media Lab and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School (June 19-21, 2006). A variety of parties – governments, technology companies, health organizations, financial institutions, international agencies, and merchants – will address a spectrum of issues from terrorism and child pornography to identity theft and spam, but also new business models building on virtual identity.

In the business track of the conference, several companies and organizations, including Microsoft, IBM, Novell, BestBuy, and MyVirtual Model, will discuss and make public announcements about new products and services, and will demonstrate their next generation identity services. I will attend the conference and will try to report here what I learned!

If you want to participate as well: The full conference will be webcast by Harvard Law School.

More information on HIGGINS can be found at spwiki.editme.com and channelregister.co.uk

Linden Labs vs. the US Fed: How user-created content creates economic value

Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life and CEO of Linden Lab, is the recipient of the WIRED Rave awards in the business caregory. His achievements are presented in the form of a comparison of the Linden Lab's economy with the US economy (represented by former Fed chief Alan Greenspan)... well not really a scientific comparison, but one that provides a nice insight into the scale and creativity of user-created products:

Second Life is a subscription-based 3-D virtual reality application operated by San Francisco-based Linden Lab. The game gives its users (referred to as "residents") tools to add to and edit its world and participate in its economy. The majority of the content in the Second Life world is resident-created. Linden Lab actively promotes the concept that residents retain the intellectual property rights to objects they create (although they are required to offer Linden Lab an open license to it).

Since 2002, users have created a functioning economy based largely on services and real estate. As such, it is a perfect example of the crowdsourcing idea described in the previous posting – and another case for our concept of "interactive value creation". (More background information at Wikipedia).

So where does this lead to? Here are some excerpts from the WIRED article "Rosedale vs Greenspan":

Size of economy supervised: Rosedale: $7.7 million per month. Greenspan: $1 trillion per month.

Technique to encourage maximum spending:
Rosedale: Ensures that the Linden Dollar doesn’t appreciate against the US dollar, making it impractical and unattractive to keep Linden Dollars in savings accounts.
Greenspan: Ensured that interest rates remained low during periods of relatively slow growth, making it impractical and unattractive to keep US dollars in savings accounts.

Means of maintaining price stability:
Rosedale: Aggressively adding money to the currency supply as the overall size of the economy increases.
Greenspan: Reducing the supply of money by aggressively raising interest rates when inflation begins to rise.

Catchphrase:
Rosedale: “I’m not building a game. I’m building a new country.”
Greenspan: “But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to un-expected and prolonged contractions, as they have in Japan over the past decade?”

Read more here. And in any case, the Second Life Economy is in the moment much faster growing than the US Economy, has a younger, educated and healthy population, no enviromental concerns, always good weather, and is in no war with anyone.

UK Pop Duo Erasure sells customizable MP3s -- Music configurator online

Sean McManus reports in his blog on a new technology that enables fans of the UK synth pop duo Erasure to mix their own single and then download the custom mix as an MP3 for UK£2.

This is the ultimate version of the "limited edition CD" trend". The web site erasuredownload.com offers a web interface, a kind of music configurator, representing different parts of the music like the bass line, synth lines, drum pattern, vocal delivery and backing vocals.

In his article, Sean reports how he purchased mix number 16835 (out of about 40,000 different possible mixes). But most important:

"The site won't sell two remixes the same, but there are 40,000 different possible combinations to choose from. "When someone tries to buy a version we check whether the version number is already bought or not," says Marc-Henri Wouters, CEO and founder of Trust Media, the company behind the customization technology. "If the desired version has not been previously bought, then we continue the buying process. Otherwise we ask the user to choose another version." Now that is what I call a limited edition."

Read the full story here: http://www.sean.co.uk

This is a nice idea, and from a marketing perspective, I like the artificial limitation of the tracks. The service offers also some devoted fans without large computer or composing skills the possibility to create a custom product which shows their personal bonding to the band.

However, on the long run, I think this kind of customization is not really sustaining. New music is created by mixing and matching existing tunes, sounds, ideas or motives -- and thus the idea of sharing a band's tunes freely under a Creative Commons License with all fans is much more sustainable and satisfying. And only this allows for real creativity. This is where open innovation is superior to good ol' mass customization. There are a huge number of bands which share their content more openly with their fans (have a look at http://creativecommons.org/audio/).

Re-Post: Customize your time: Mass Customization in the watch industry - Microsoft's SPOT watches, Swatch Via d. Spiga, and Factory 1to1 (from the MC Newsletter 1/2003)

Re-Post: I have republished these articles to make them better accessible for search on the blog. This article has been published first in the Newsletter No. 1/2003.

In the age of the cell phone, who needs still a watch? All of us - but more and more not to get the time but to express our personality. Watches are one of the most prominent fashion items and a dominant matter of self expression. Thus, customization of watches is a very interesting field to study. While different companies started several attempts to offer customized watches within the last decade, I would consider few of the existing offers as a serious and professional move towards mass customization. Many companies are either small start up operations with limited scope or professional management of the customization processes, or they do not offer real customization but only small series (e.g., logo watches for promotion activities). But recently, there is a change, and more serious initiatives to customize watches on a real one to one base are approaching.

Microsoft SPOT watches

Bill Gates of Microsoft recently announced plans to use watches as a transponder for customized services. Teaming up with Fossil Inc., Suunto and Citizen Watch Co. Ltd., Gates presented in January 2003 a concept wristwatch based on Microsoft's Smart Personal Objects Technology (SPOT). With compelling features such as customizable watch faces, access to personal messages and appointments, and the ability to receive up-to-date news, traffic, weather and sports information, the watches are the first wave of smart objects that shall extend Microsoft's reach from personal computing to everyday objects. However, first models are expected to be available not before fall 2003. But it will be very interesting to see how these companies bundle hard and soft customization around the physical product and accompanying services.

Two other great examples of mass customization of watches are already available, both focusing on the (aesthetic) design level of customization:

Swiss based watch customizer Factory121 opened its Internet store some months before, and launched officially in April 2003. This is not only the best customization site in the watch industry, but also one of the best configuration systems in all categories. Why? See below.

But let's first have a look on the customization initiative of a big and established player in the industry: Swatch. This brand is sometimes quoted as an example of mass customization - but it is not. Swatch is a typical example of a variant manufacturer that has the capabilities to bring out a huge quantity of variants and collections in a short time. However, customers can only select between made-to-stock products out of a huge variety.

Swatch Via della Spiga

After two very successful decades, the brand lost some of its original power in the last couple of years. While in former times Swatch could handle forecasting and product planning pretty easily as demand was so strong that even not so popular models could be sold without problems, new competition (trends) and an too established brand name force the company to go new ways. One approach to redefine the brand is the introduction of new (standard) models breaking with the traditional product platforms. Another tactic is customization which was recently introduced quietly in one concept store and is now in a pilot phase.

"Experience the language of fashion - you become the artist and accessorize your own Swatch." This is the advertising claim of Swatch's Via della Spiga concept store in Milan, Europe's fashion and style metropolis #1. Placed in the trend setting arena of the city where all big international designers have their stores, Swatch tries to update its image by using the latest fashion details of the surrounding designers for a very special collection of watches. "Catwalk details, chic styling, fabric trimming, edgy appliqués, unexpected coupling of materials, textile variants, enhancers such as crystals, feathers, fun fur, chandelier strands, studs, stones, ribbons, snaps, buckles, and beads await you. It's a chance to indulge your personality. Define your fashion silhouette," says the catalogue.

I visited the store three weeks ago. It looks much more boutique than the standard swatch store, more like a fashionable jewelry store. First of all you recognize a really beautiful collection of ready-made watches which are only available in this store, however, pre-configured. In a second room, a workshops appears. Here, as demonstrated in a video, customers can design their own (women's) watches. Breaking with the traditional concept, clients choose from pre-assembled watch bodies and combine them with a made-to-measure jelly ribbon plastic band that is supposed to be turned around one's wrist, ankle, neck or waist several times. The band can be decorated with heart, flower and star crystal appliqués, and even filled with different objects like small pearls or stars. The results is a very special look (you can get an idea on http://www.swatch.com, go to the "Via della Spiga" section). All custom assembling is done by the client with the help of a sales clerk on the spot. Watches are priced between 37 and 100 Euro.

While the extent of customization is not going very far, and the total approach is rather simple, this is one of the most striking examples of a new customization trend that goes beyond the traditional differentiation advantages of mass customization:

* Swatch uses customization in this store as an expression of self, as a concept to redefine its brand. While in former times a single, often famous professional designer was featured creating a special watch, in this concept the individual customer and its creativity and personal style is in the center of the product design. This is a total change of thinking.

* However, the product family design and constraints of the product system stop "bad design". Even if users have plenty of choices, restrictions prevent that the Swatch brand image is spoiled by bad consumer co-design.

* The open store atmosphere and the public workshop invite a community driven co-design. While in most mass customization applications individuality means also a one-to-one configuration process, the Swatch store provides the platform for a community of users to create an individual piece jointly. Using virtual and real-life communities to support mass customization is a concept that got just recently growing attention.

I am curious to see how this system develops: is it only a short pilot or the starting point of a larger movement? I will keep you posted.

Factory 121

In the watch-making industry, high quality "Swiss made" brands have been out of the reach of the majority of watch buyers - if they didn't want to get a Swatch. The intention of mass customization pioneer Factory121 is to close this gap. Frédéric Polli, one of its founders states it very clearly: "Margins and cost structures in the classic watch distribution channels are a major obstacle to the positioning of 'Swiss made' watches for the majority of watch buyers. New information technologies, like the internet, give us the ability to offer the excellent quality of Swiss watches to ordinary buyers under different conditions."

But the firm does much more than just bypassing the traditional sales channel. On Factory121's Internet site, users can co-design their very own wristwatch. After several years of planning, product development, marketing tests, and technology development Factory121 opened its (virtual) doors at the beginning of this year. The visible center of Factory121 is its web site, developed over a two-year period under the lead of Pete Beck, CEO of Brighton based Electrostrata LTD (http://www. electrostrata.com).

I had the opportunity to follow the development of this company since a longer period of time, and even if I had an idea of what would come up, I was really expressed when the official site launched. What makes this mass customization site an foremost exemplar for its industry (and mass customization in general, make sure that you interact with the site at http://www.factory121.com):

* The customer co-design process begins with a watch model that is already partially assembled. By presenting this pre-configuration, complexity is reduced. However, the combinations offered are almost infinite.

* As in the case of Swatch, the product family design prevents "bad design". Restrictions of choice prevent that a specific style is spoiled by "bad" consumer co-design.

* The 3-D quality of the design tools delivers a great user experience. Speed and feedback of the site are excellent. Virtual images are created in real-time depending upon the uses' choices. The interaction and animation elements of the Internet site are based on Java, a mature, reliable and popular technology that does not demand any plug-in.

* Users get a game-like interactive experience in which they perceive themselves living a unique and fun buying process ("flow experience"). When designing and purchasing a watch from Factory121 the buying process becomes an important part of the product - and, thus, an important driver of customer satisfaction.

* Despite the nice design and experience, the site offers also plenty of explanations and product information. Just have a look at the customized product description once you finished the customization process.

* The site supports price customization. It enables customers to design a watch within the constraints of their personal budget. Therefore, just by choosing, e.g., a leather strap over a stainless steal one, clients can choose an option suiting their budget. As customers work through each category of components, colors and selections, they are always aware of how their design choices are impacting the watch's final price. Doing so, Factory121 is one of the few examples using modular pricing.

The site is supplemented by high customer service. The firm operates own repair centers in its most important international markets, free shipping, and a strong quality guaranty. As buyers cannot physically touch the watch they are ordering, Factory 121 guarantees that, in case of any problems, the product will be exchanged or taken back after repayment in ten days without any question.

The price paid by customers (between 120 and 200 Euro) represents very much a mass customization cost structure - and is much below the average price of a standard Swiss watch of this category. Costs and distribution margins which can easily reach two thirds of a watch's price in a traditional distribution system have disappeared in this model. This enables Factory121 to invest heavily in the maintenance and development of the firm's online platform - and to counterbalance the additional manufacturing and transaction (handling) costs of dealing with individual customers' orders.

As soon as an order is made, it is transferred to the manufacturing site of Rhodanus AG, located in the Swiss province of Valais. The sixty employees of this family owned watch-maker have been assembling prestigious Swiss brands for over thirty years. A made-to-order watch will be mailed to the customer within ten working days. Despite the already launched web site, the owners plan to offer their products also in affiliate stores and for corporate customers.

The web site has just launched, and it's too early to evaluate if Factory 121 will become the DELL of the Watch Industry. However, early user feedback is very promising ("Je suis impressionné en bien par la qualité de votre service client", says Marc Priolo, Head of DELL Customer Service Switzerland). I will follow this case closely and keep you informed what's happening at Factory 121. In the meantime, I am waiting for the real big innovation in this field: How could I customize my time and get that 25-hour-day?

Mass Customization of Books: Amazon finally jumps on the unbundling trend

Amazon.com announced last week that it will finally offer readers the possibility to customize books from various publishers. Building on its "Search Inside the Book" technology, which allows customers to search the complete interior text of hundreds of thousands of books, the company is currently developing two new programs that will enable customers to purchase online access to any page, section, or chapter of a book, as well as the book in its entirety.

Amazon thus is finally offering on a retail level what innovative publishers like MetaText, Cinado.com, Symposion or Addison Wesley have done since years: Providing readers the opportunity to purchase just the pages they really need. What might be not a good idea for novels, is great for edited books or also many trade books, where often the first and last chapter are giving you 80% of the information you want to know.

Indeed, also my most recent book on mass customization and open innovation has been published in this manner (in German language: "Mass Customization und Kundenintegration: Neue Wege zum innovativen Produkt", co-authored by Frank Piller and Christof Stotko, 2003). This was the first customizable book on mass customization. The book's first part discusses the implementation of a mass customization strategy and extends the concept towards open innovation. Readers can order all chapters of this book separately (here, of course, the 80% rule mentioned before does not apply).

The second part of our book consists of more than 25 case studies and plenty of additional expert chapters on specific parts of the book. These chapters can be identified with an easy, but useful configurator, helping readers to decide which chapter is fitting best to their needs (more information on the book: http://www.mass-customization.de/ibook.htm, the configurator can be found here: http://www.symposion.de/msc/inhalt.htm).

So, while Amazon's announcement is nothing new, it will affect the market for customization in the book sector enormously as it will offer readers a one-stop-shopping and combine customization with Amazon's market power.

In one of the planned offerings, called "Amazon Pages", the physical-world experience of buying and reading a book will be "un-bundle" so that customers can simply and inexpensively purchase and read online just the pages they need. For example, an entrepreneur interested in marketing his or her business could purchase the relevant chapters from several best-selling business books.

A second program, "Amazon Upgrade," will allow customers to "upgrade" their purchase of a physical book on Amazon.com to include complete online access. For example, a software developer who buys a Java programming book will not only get the physical book delivered to his or her home, but will also get Web access to the complete text of the book. Buy a cookbook and you will not only have it on your shelf, but also be able to access it anywhere via the Web. However, many publishers still have to sign so that Amazon can offer these services. In the moment, only very few books are available in this mass customization program.

For customers, this is great news. It will make access to books faster and more accessable. And will finally also provide to customers the convenience that purchasing one chapter is cheaper and more convenient than copying this chapter from the library page by page.

An overview of recent customization offerings in footwear and apparel (Updated)

Footwear and apparel are the most common products being customized today. I get many e-mails asking about some major examples in these areas. Thus, here a short collection of some more recent examples. This is not a comprehensive list !! If you know an important example missing here, just e-mail me and I will be glad to include it in the list. Or just add a comment below (this list has been updated on Oct 27).

The following list was initiated by the web blog 'World of Custom, An Overview of Current Custom Consumer Offerings', as compiled by Jason Davis/Merge Design.

FOOTWEAR -- SPORTSHOES
(more detailed descriptions here)

Adidas Mi (http://www.adidas.com): Six shoes (running, soccer, tennis, indoor, basketball) with three areas of customization; fit (length and width of each foot), performance (outsole and midsole options and seasonal upper materials) and design (choosing from over 100 color combinations and embroidered lettering). All of which has to be done in person at select Adidas store locations.

Reebok Custom (http://www.rbkcustom.com): NEW! One of the best configurators with many features. But even if this is a perfect example of how a configurator should look alike, I am afraid that RBK will just be seen as a late follower, copying what everyone else in their industry does as well. There are no innovative customization features from the perspective of the consumer.

Converse (http://www.converse.com/converseone/): Three shoes (Chuck Taylors high and low and Jack Purcells) with the One Star coming soon. Custom color and embroidered lettering online using the Nike iD engine.

Nike iD (http://www.nikeid.com/): Fifty-one shoes (thirty-one for men, seventeen for women and three for kids) six bags, five watches and three golf balls. Custom color and lettering on Nike’s third generation site.

Puma Mongolian BBQ (http://www.puma.com/mongolianbbq/): Single style served up at hands on kiosks open for limited times at select Puma locations. Very tactile with a DIY flavor. There is also an on-line version replicating the in-store experiment.

Vans (http://shop.vans.com): Two shoes. Custom color and patterns online with a solid and well thought out interface for color selection.

Timberland (http://www.timberland.com/customboots/): new website, now with state of the art configurator, many color options for men and women (more extensive review here).

JG Customs (http://booktown.com/jgcustoms/): hand painted, real actual personalization, small batch sizes, DIY approach.

O’Neill: (http://www.oneill-action.com/designyoursneaker.php) open innovation experiment, co-creation of new styles and design competition, but no custom manufacturing

FootJoy Golf Shoes (http://www.myjoys.com/): Popular golf shoe. Custom color and individual length and widths for both right and left shoes.

FOOTWEAR -- DRESS SHOES

Selve (http://www.selve.net): Munich based custom footwear company for women's shoes. Latest design and custom fit (based on foot scan). Stores in Munich and London. Manufacturing in Italy.

Steve Madden (http://www.SteveMadden.com):Newly-launched “Design Your Own” collection on SteveMadden.com offers options resulting in a total of 4,221 combinations. Consumers can make their choices among product features such as heel height, pattern, material, finishing and color. Special as formal women's dress shoes -- no sneakers!

Leftfoot (http://www.leftfootcompany.com): Leading European provider of custom footwear for men. Stores all over Europe, production in Finland. Custom fit and design.

Otabo (http://www.otabo.com): Upcoming US brand and manufacturer for mass customized men's shoes. Growing number of stores, manufactured in the US (Florida).

APPAREL

Adidas Team (http://www.adidas.com): new Japanese offering, create your own team outfit, nice and easy configurator

Land’s End (http://landsend.com): Nine apparel pieces (Jeans, Chinos, Shits and a Jacket for men and women). Color and custom sizing all offered up on the Archetype engine.

Target, JC Penny, Tommy Hilfiger: Similar offerings to Lands’ End (mostly jeans and pants with a shirt or two). All use same Archetype engine.

MeJeans (http://mejeans.com): A new custom jeans maker in the US, offers more than 89 trillion possibilities for truly custom jeans, self measurement, rather complex configurator, for people loving and knowing jeans very well. Very good pricing (about 100 USD per pair). [more background information]

UJeans (http://UJeans.com): Founded in Oct 2005, this Canadian jeans manufacturers offers custom jeans as well, self measurement, again only for people knowing jeans very well. Good pricing (less than 100 USD per pair) and a great "workbook" to educate the customers about eans customization (the configurator is still very basic, though).

Polo Ralph Lauren (http://www.polo.com): Fourteen apparel pieces (four shirts and one tie for men, four shirts and one bikini for women and four shirts for kids). Basic color and monogram choice via straightforward web page.

Nunatak Kobuk Mountain Jacket (www.nunatakusa.com):
Custom hiking jacket; rather simple design, style choices come down to pockets on the front or inside and a hood. choice of nylon; custom arm and chest measurements for perfect fit (review here). Alternative offerings from Beyond, ME: www.beyondfleece.com

NeighborHoodies (http://neighborhoodies.com/): Growing chain of personalization stores. Plethora of base products (sweatshirts, t-shirts, pants, shorts, hats, underwear, baby clothes, etc.). All customized with lettering and iron-ons.

Spread Shirt (http://www.spreadshirt.com/): Much more than customized t-shirts, but opportunity for every user to open custom t-shirt shop and sell their own creations to others. Great business model, and one of the largest recent success stories.

CustomInk (http://www.customink.com/): Special to this site is its community orientation: Most customers do not customize for themselves, but for an entire group. Kind of peer-segmentation.

Route One (http://www.routeone-design.com/): Custom corporate clothing.

Pixeltees (http://www.pixeltees.com): Easy and simple t-shirt customization site. Many similar sites like this on the web.

Lids baseball caps (http://www.lidscyo.com)

GEAR

Time121 (http://www.factory121.com): Swiss made custom watches, high quality, many customization options, VERY nice configurator.

Fossil (http://www.fossil.com): Very simple customization offering, but reinforcing the trend.

Blancier (http://www.blancier.com): Anotehr custom watch manufacturer, but much less choice and options compared to Factory121.

Ultimate Ears Earbuds (www.ultimateears.com): Pricey earbuds with superior sound quality and custom buds based on silicone casts of customers' auditory canals and outer ears taken by an audiologist.

Timbuk2 (http://www.timbuk2.com): One bag (classic messenger in four sizes). Custom color, options and accessories through well built online site. One of the first mass customizers in existence. Powers also NikeID custom bags.

Freitag (http://www.freitag.ch/f-cut/): One bag. Based on custom, utilizing used truck tarps for base material with online interface that lets you select the actual pieces made to build your bag.

L.L.Bean (http://www.llbean.com): Three bags (boat tote, classic backpack and messenger bag). Custom color and feature selection (extra pockets, strap lengths, etc.).

Web Analytics, Mass Customization, and Metadata Converge

A guest article by Jack Aaronson, Head of Aaronson Consulting [reprinted from http://www.clickz.com/experts/crm/traffic/article.php/3488916 ].

You responded more to two column series [of Jack Aaronson in ClickZ]. last year than any other columns combined: the metadata series and the mass customization series. Since return-on-investment (ROI) marketing involves understanding analytics
and how well your site and products are performing, let's revisit these two topics to understand how sales data and analytics are affected by these two separate, yet intertwined, ideas.

An interesting byproduct of mass customization and detailed metadata is a much more granular understanding of trends and style. Products are currently created based on what's popular and selling well. Although this ensures new products are introduced to an accepting marketplace, it also limits creativity. Also, it can sometimes be wrong.

Imagine a pair of jeans mass-produced by a major brand. It's the strongest seller of the season. Based on that knowledge, the company creates a new series of jeans based on the same design concept. The original jeans had a different type of pocket and a different type of stitching. Yet the entire new line of jeans fails to find a market
when released.

How's that possible?

Likely, the specific attribute that contributed to the high sales wasn't known. Though the defining traits of the jeans were new pockets and stitching, perhaps the fabric was what consumers responded to. Hundreds of variables go into making each product. It's difficult to know, based on sales data alone, which attributes informed the buying decision.

Companies test new products as a matter of course. They ask consumers what they like about the new product. Consumers, however, can't always tell you why they like something. New-car buyers may say they bought the car because of its mileage or comfortable seats. Trend analysis may show the actual selling points were the handling or look of its fenders.

If the jeans manufacturer in the above example had the ability to mass-customize its jeans, it might have better understood why that initial pair of jeans sold so well. Mass customization allows a new level of meta-data collection about buying habits. The jeans manufacturer would be able to report on the highest-selling pocket type, stitching, material, color, cut, and zipper style. This level of knowledge could enable it to create a new mass-produced line of clothing based on the best attributes
of its customized line.

A personalized user experience focused on these attributes can go one step further in creating a customized user experience based on products and their attributes. If, for instance, the user selects a certain color for an apparel item, the personalized user experience can show other products in that color. It could suggest complementary colors. It could even put together a matched wardrobe based on color palettes.

A personalized experience based on this granular knowledge can even help companies that sell only mass-produced products. One of our clients sells jewelry. Though they can tell what the best-selling items are, they couldn't tell you why. We created an attribute-based search/browse system that allows users to search by attributes, not just product categories. These attributes are normalized across the entire product inventory.

Instead of just browsing for "bracelets," the user can look specifically at bracelets that are "gold," "24k," and "white" and feature "diamonds." The user similarly can look at all other types of jewelry, filtering by the same attributes.

The reporting difference is huge. Now, the company can see not only what products sell well but also trends in what people like. It can see platinum jewelry across all product lines is selling better than gold. It can see diamonds surrounded by rubies are a fashion trend, as opposed to diamonds surrounded by another stone. It can understand not only what products are doing well but why they're doing well.

This knowledge helps the business in several ways. The marketing department can better plan promotions and know what to feature on prominent pages of its Web site and catalog. Buyers can better predict what types of jewelry will sell well and maximize its inventory. Jewelry manufacturers get valuable feedback on why people like their products and other products it should manufacture.

Web analytics, mass customization, and metadata combine in an extremely powerful way. They allow companies to understand minute details about customers' preferences and buying/browsing habits. Companies will understand the ROI of their products' detailed aspects beyond anything ascertainable simply by crunching SKU-based sales data.

Jack can be reached at jraaronson@jraaronson.com

Customization in the press: Reinforcing the customization trend

This is a review of three recent press publications which highlighted or reinforced interesting aspects of customization and personalization. Together, they provide a nice summary of upcoming trends around the theme of the creative consumer. The first article is an interview with Rob Walker on 'actual personalization', the second one reports promising news from new VC for MC, and the third is from The Economist and discusses the creative consumer and user innovation.

(1) Rob Walker and “actual customization”

Rob Walker is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers on consumption trends in the United States. He examines consumer behavior in his weekly column, "CONSUMED," for The New York Times Magazine. o the following part of an interview with Rob Walker by Holly Taylor, published by the online magazine Core77, stroke my attention. In this interview, Walker draws a fine line between “customization” and “actual customization”, the first offered by companies via configurators (selection from pre-defined options), the latter an activity of consumers who take an existing product and modify it in a unique way by their own.

“C77: What are the themes that come out in what consumers are responding to?

RW: I think that the most interesting phenomenon lately is the idea of customization.
I want to draw a line between the idea of customization and actual customization. They are two different things. I think that many businesses are catering to the idea of customization. Like with the Nike iD website or Puma's Mongolian Barbeque—where you can choose colors and materials for a sneaker—it's customization, but it's within parameters. You probably have enough choices there to come up with something that is extremely unlikely to be worn by someone else at a party.

But there is a huge difference between making a pair of shoes, and working through these sets of options provided by a giant company to produce something you want, so long as it has their logo on it. I think that that idea of customization is resonant with everyone. It's obvious that we all want two things in life: to stand out and be different and to fit in and be part of something. That's not my insight, but I think that it's true.”

Walker is then referring to artists like SBTG (google SBTG and sneakers to learn more) who is physically hand painting standard Nike shoes in editions of 25 or 40: “He's not sitting around doing project work for a company and speculating or wishing that someone would recognize what he's doing. He's doing stuff that is being treated as art objects.” Interestingly however, even this “real” customizer is working in the context of Nike and Adidas. They take existing branded standard products and transform them into a personalized piece. So also actual customization builds on “mass”.

(2) Personalization catches fire among VCs

While hand painting sneakers are a trend that might have not a huge following with the majority of consumers, firms are increasingly helping their customers to become creative on their own, as an article by Verne Kopytoff in the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Here are some quotes.

Kopytoff reports about companies which enable especially personalization or esthetic design, i.e. building on the trend described by Walker above that consumers want to transfer existing standard products into an object of self impression. And recently ventures capitalists are investing (again) in these companies:

“Customized T-shirts, posters and postage stamps have emerged as the Internet's latest darlings among venture capitalists. Zazzle, a Palo Alto company that allows users to buy personalized products, announced it had received $16 million in funding from two of Google's early backers, Kleiner Perkins' John Doerr and Ram Shriram of Sherpalo Ventures. Earlier this year, a similar company, CafePress.com, in San Leandro, received $14 million in a second round of funding led by Sequoia Capital.”

At Zazzle “… users create their own designs for products including T- shirts, posters and greeting cards. The websites then handle the printing and shipping. Many people simply use the web sites to make gifts for family members and friends. Others earn royalties by selling their products or designs to shoppers on the sites.”

“The idea is more evolutionary than revolutionary. Consumers have been able to get customized trinkets at flea markets and county fairs for years featuring their names or images. What sets the online version apart is its potential global reach. Shriram, the investor, said that is in part what attracted him to Zazzle. "This is an opportunity to do mass customization," he said. "The scaling of this has been an interesting challenge."

(3) The Economist: The rise of the creative consumer

The Economist (Mar 12, 2005, p. 75) discusses how and why smart companies are harnessing the creativity of their customers. The story builds on the new book of Eric von Hippel (see interview below). Here some quotes:

“ … Not only is the customer king: now he is market-research head, R&D chief and product-development manager, too. This is not all new. Researchers such as Nikolaus Franke at the University of Vienna and Christian Lüthje at the Technical University of Hamburg have demonstrated the importance of past user contributions to the evolution of everything from sporting equipment to construction materials and scientific instruments. But the rise of online communities, together with the development of powerful and easy-to-use design tools, seems to be boosting the phenomenon, as well as bringing it to the attention of a wider audience.

"User innovation has always been around," Eric von Hippel says. "The difference is that people can no longer deny that it is happening." Indeed, it is "very likely that the majority of innovation happens this way." … In the past firms have mostly resisted customer innovation or not known what to do with it. American farmers were lobbying manufacturers to make cars with detachable back seats as early as 1909. It took Detroit more than a decade to "invent" the pick-up truck. … Within three weeks of launching "Mindstorms", a build-it-yourself robot development system, in 1997, Lego was facing around 1,000 hackers who had downloaded its operating system, vastly improved it, and posted their work freely online. After a long stunned silence, Lego appears to have accepted the merits of this community's work: programs written in hacker language may now be uploaded to the Mindstorms website, for example. …”

The whole article is worthwhile to read, get it on The Economist website or search for it in your local library. Or just read on for an interview with Eric von Hippel about this topic.