Mass Customization & Open Innovation News

[Interview] PUMA's Head of eCommerce: Changes and Challenges of Customization in the Apparel Industry

Our friends at embodee have recently conducted a very interesting interview with Thomas Davis, global head of e-commerce for PUMA. To share his views with you, embodee sent us the following guest post, with excerpts from the original interview, that we recommend for a number of interesting insights.  

Embodee, a company headquartered in Portland, Oregon, enables apparel brands to display virtual samples for merchandising and finished garments for customization. Its patented imaging technology digitally scans, stitches, and drapes physical garments, creating 3D virtual renderings true to reality in appearance, size, and fit. The garments are viewable from any angle and easy to customize with various design features. Images of highly customizable garments for some of the world's largest sports apparel brands are delivered online by Embodee's SaaS platform

Embodee: What are the most significant challenges for apparel companies like PUMA in this omni-channel sales world? There’s certainly a lot being written about it.

 

Davis: It depends on what kind of company you are. I’ll boil it down to just PUMA and the wholesale channels because this is a landscape of your retail and wholesale channels; and obviously your wholesalers are partners and clients too. Secondly, the brand has to decide what is the balance between sales and marketing. So it’s a complicated dance to figure out, and there isn’t one right or wrong answer. Further, how do you get these channels to work in concert while still balancing the needs of marketing and brand? Making sure that all of these business interests—everything—work together and complement each other is much easier said than done.

Customers don’t care or understand the internal conflicts. Nor should they. Customers simply want what they want, which in our case is our product and our brand experience. Customers don’t think in terms of business units or channels. They think in terms of product and buying that product as easily as possible.

Trying to find that multi-channel synergy is really, really hard because traditional brands like a PUMA or anybody of this size that has grown as a traditional wholesaler aren’t prepared for some of the changes happening in the retail world. Some of the rules for the last 60 or 70 years are breaking down. And what took decades to establish is now being broken down in months as the speed of the digital world is accelerating. Example: Rocket Internet. They are basically copying the Zappos model outside the U.S. and growing their business to billions in revenue in just a year or two, which is x-fold faster than Zappos, which was x-fold faster than traditional wholesale distribution. It’s jaw-dropping how fast everything is evolving, especially outside the U.S. What retail looks like in five or 10 years, who knows? But you’re seeing examples of companies trying to find their way in this marketplace. Some are doing well at it and some aren’t.

Embodee: Speaking of those challenges, how does your vision for e-commerce address them?

Davis: For PUMA specifically, we have to attack the market in a very focused way because the reality of our situation is that we can’t compete on price, meaning we can’t be the lowest price out in the market. That’s just kind of cutting ourselves off at the knees. Further, we don’t have the luxury of running a break-even business, meaning we can’t put all of our operating expenses toward overnight shipping and service. Yet, we are consistently compared to those digital players. But that is the reality we live within, and we have to find creative ways to be relevant.

So I try to look at where can we compete and compete effectively. One is product content. I believe we must have world-class PUMA information about our products (photography, copy, content, digital assets, etc.). We also should have the most comprehensive, user-friendly experience for shopping decision-making in the digital world.

We hope that our PUMA experience will be better than an Amazon’s “shop in shop” presentation for PUMA, and better than a Zappos, for example. Specifically, as a retailer we don’t have much control over the presentation of our products in our partners’ stores/marketplaces. We’re losing brand control, if you will. Search Google for “puma suede” and you will see the varying degrees of photography/presentation. Some good, some bad. Theoretically, we should be able to showcase our products in our store in the best lens possible, and we will aim to do this over the next few seasons.

One of our key strategies is product information management. We’ve spent a tremendous amount of effort and time over the last two years honing these skills internally. Unfortunately, it’s generally a behind-the-scenes kind of project. The only in-front-of-the scenes result of that is really the output of a website and customers interacting with that information.

But I believe that’s a cornerstone of our strategy. The other cornerstone is product selection. If we’re selling the same exact product as Amazon, and if they’re going to beat us on price and service and be comparable on product information, then we’re still going to lose. Probably nine times out of 10. But if we can create a product assortment, develop product awareness, product depth—whether its size, color or make of material—that’s different than what’s in the wholesale channel—then we have an area for competition and a reason for customers to come to our online store.

So between world class product content and offering a product selection that’s different or at least complementary to what is in other channels, that’s where we can play and immediately be competitive.

Embodee: How does mass customization fit in from your perspective?

Davis: When you start thinking about a diversified product strategy in terms of more SKUs, more colors, and more options, you start running into liability. Meaning, you have to front load cash flow to pay for inventory/product that might sit on shelves for weeks if not months before it’s purchased and your return on the investments is recouped. It’s the long-tail game. When you’re trying to keep your margins high and your turn ratios high, it’s a very difficult one to balance. Creating lots of inventory that sits on shelves all over the world is just basically money sitting there that can’t be allocated toward other business-enhancing projects. The turnaround time on product is probably a year lead time for some companies. That’s a long time to tie up money, especially when there’s no guarantee in the world of fashion.

You’re taking physical bets on what the trend or the style will be a year from now, and who knows whether Jay-Z comes out with a new record, Justin Timberlake does something, or Taylor Swift wears a pair of PUMAs in her video. It’s serendipity to some extent (or really good product placement—hah). So when I start thinking about those kinds of constraints I start to look at on-demand products. What’s better than being able to create something on demand and eliminate those upfront risks?

To develop products, colors and/or styles that may mean nothing to the customer a year from now, you end up with excess product. This is what happened in 2008 when we hit the recession and companies were left with shelves full of product which needed to be liquidated. The only way to push that amount of excess product is to flood the market and discount like crazy. That is not sustainable from a business perspective. So I start to look at on-demand or mass customization as a plausible solution for a company like PUMA, which answers a lot of our financial challenges. But it allows the consumer to dictate freely what he or she wants.

That’s liberating for a business owner and also creates desire from consumers, which gives us a great competitive advantage—provided we do something really cool for the brand, that’s PUMA-fied, that the consumers love. I see that as a pinnacle piece of our strategy going forward, and I think it will be so in the retail industry for years to come. Look at the entrants into this new paradigm: Threadless, Zazzle, NIKEiD, miadidas, New Balance, Timberland, Converse, etc. etc. The list grows every month. It’s happening in myriad industries as well, so it’s not just limited to footwear and t-shirts. More examples: Shutterfly, ForYourParty.com, L.L.Bean, the lists go on. Remember Dell Computers? Designing your own computer system was a breakthrough.

I’ll fully admit that PUMA is late to the game. We only recently launched PUMA Factory, our first crack at online customization. Currently, it’s live for the U.S. and Germany. We believe it’s still in “beta” stage, and over the next few months we will determine if we’re on the right track operationally as well as from a presentation point of view. The opportunities are amazing if we get the block and tackling done.

People pay a premium for customization. They expect to have to wait for it to be made, so the immediate gratification may not be there, but it’s still quick and it’s individually driven. Dare I say, a younger generation? They want to stand out, they want to be unique, and that’s just in the U.S. Once you start going global with these ideas, your ability to function with less risk—less cash flow volatility—it’s potential, it’s plausible. It could be fantastic on so many levels for the brand, like PUMA, as well as for the customer.

It still needs to be proven, but I think you’re seeing companies like the NIKEiDs of the world going this way. I think you’re seeing the Zazzles having done really well. Threadless. There are the big retailers trying to do it like H&M or even Zara. This is the way you can close that timeline to market. I think it’s the future—part of the future—of retail at least. I think it has to be.

Embodee: You mentioned young people. They have an expectation that they should be able to order on demand or customize because they’ve grown up with that option in other arenas. Almost everything they do is customized whether it’s music or pick your topic.

Davis: I completely agree. My nieces and nephews are in their late teens and they’ve never known anything different, and that’s only going to become more amplified globally. Their expectations will include the ability to customize as a standard, not an exception. It’s going to get to the point where everything is a showroom. You’re seeing stores go out of business because they try to overstock. I think they should be embracing the showroom aspect and let people customize. “Here are three basic colors in the store, buy them if you want, but if you want the new shiny toy—insert your product—in purple and chartreuse, order it customized and we’ll have it for you next week.”

The question is what companies are going to truly embrace that? If you’re buying a year ahead, you can support putting product on a boat and letting it ship from China to the U.S., and that takes six weeks. That’s all gone when you go to this model, you’re just speeding up the processing chain, but it is completely doable. This may be a reach, but Ford was the first to create the assembly line for cars. This was a drastic and radical step almost a 100 years ago. There is nothing stopping retailers, like PUMA, from making a radical shift in the production pipeline if it will not only solve a company’s cash/investment challenges but (even more importantly) satisfy the customer’s want and need.

I think there is an old adage that says something like, “The customer is always right…” This is truer now than ever in the world of customization.

The original interview and a lot more about embodee can also be found at the embodee website!

Featured Companies from the MC500 (Part 21): Choiceshirts: Individual Upper Bodies

In our series of postings introducing companies that performend very well in our Customization 500 study, we are introducing the next mass customizer. Remember:  The order of these feature postings is more or less randomly!

 

Today: Known concept, nice execution

Customized T-Shirts are nothing new to the mass customization enthusiast, indeed, there are more than 100 online vendors in this category. But at the same time, tshirst are one of the most well-known individualized products and certainly one of those that will always have their fans and buyers. Customized shirts are usually affordable and useful in a variety of situations.

One competitior on this crowded market is Choice Shirts. Their slogan "wear what you think" is pretty much program for them as they give you the tools to create a shirt with more or less any motive you could want to wear.

A simple yet solid configurator lets you chose from either a large variety of cliparts, a custom text or your own uploaded image - or a combination thereof. Whatever print you choose will be applied on the shirt you selct from different models of shirts and shipped to your doorstep. Alternatively, if your creativity does not serve you just today, the company also has a huge variety of pre-configured shirts for many different themes.

 
Note: Please see this post for detailed information on how to interpret the above data.

Interview with German handbag customizer Project OONA

Not long ago we reported about OpenRunway, a mass customization venture enabling customers to personalize women's shoes and handbags.

For those (female) readers who can not get enough of customized bags, here is another very neat company from Germany: Project OONA. 

Project OONA features a nicely done configurator which lets you customize most aspects of your bag, after selecting one from a number of base models. 

 

Maru Winnacker, CEO of Project OONA, kindly agreed to give us some insight into the venture, what makes it different and how she sees the future of mass customization. 

FTP: Maru, can you tell a bit more about Project OONA? What exactly are you offering?

MW: Project OONA is a brand development company offering customization of handbags online. On our website customers will be able to customize their handbag. They start out with a design from our collection and then choose from different types of colors, linings, materials, etc. 

FTP: Personalized (Hand-)Bags are not exactly a new idea. What sets your company apart from the competition in this field?

MW: I agree that "personalization", i.e. the imprint of names or signatures, of fashion items has been around for quite some time. However, offers are rare, seldom integrated and mostly provided by high margin luxury brands. One prominent example is "Mon Monogram" by Louis Vuitton. 

However, "customization" as a means of giving customers full access to the production decision is a new phenomenon. The production and distribution processes involved are quite complex and we are experiencing a steep learning curve. There is only a small group of competitors online, all of which for less than 24 months and non supported by a global player. 

We researched all available offers online. However, these websites target either a very young audience or the mass market. We strongly believe that consumers deserve a recognizable brand to engage with: A logo, a specific style, excellent materials and perfect quality. That's how we try to distinguish ourselves. We are also targeting a premium customer segment focusing on internationally traveled business women who have an elaborate sense of value.

FTP: So far you are offering bags of different kinds (including iPad cases) from fine leather. Are there any plans to expand your business in the foreseeable future? Do you plan on diversifying your portfolio?

MW: Yes, of course! We started with handbags and fine leather accessories. We will quickly introduce additional handbag styles and materials. In the medium term new business segments (e.g. travel bags) will be added. In the long run, you will certainly see us experimenting with other customizable fashion categories.

FTP: What are your current markets? Do you offer exclusively for German customers or is Project OONA a world wide venture?

MW: As mentioned, Project OONA has an international claim. We started our service in Austria and Germany due to our local home field advantage. We will soon launch our English website and start shipping within Europe.

FTP: Where do you see your venture five years from now?

MW: Five years from now is a long time. I hope to be selling worldwide by then, with 2 - 3 more fashion product categories.

FTP: Do you think that mass customization in general is a long-lasting new paradigm that will change the face of retail significantly? Or is it just another trend?

MW: If there has been a paradigm shift towards mass customization it has happened years ago! The automotive industry has been adapting to this for years. The fashion industry will need to adapt quickly due to increasing customer demands as well as complete product and product value transparency. There are a myriad of innovative experiments currently online (e.g. virtual reality measuring, affiliate marketing etc.) that should leave not customer demand unfulfilled. Why should a customer shop around when she can design her fashion item herself? It is easy to get hooked to this kind of luxury!

So yes! I strongly believe that mass customization in the fashion industry is here to stay. It offers huge potential both online and offline. It brings customers and retail closer together. And I also believe that the current divided on- and offline retail chains will merge into one channel soon. Customers should be able to choose online and pick up offline and vice versa. 

FTP: Are you currently recruiting or looking for partners? Who would you want to work with if given the choice?

MW: Currently we are looking for more software engineers. Anyone interested?

 FTP: Thank you very much for this interesting interview! Im looking forward to see your venture grow and become an established brand on its market.

[Market Watch] Open Runway: A Women's Customization Paradise

Certainly, vendors offering individualized shoes and handbags are not a truly new concept. But some do it better than others, at the very least in terms of configurator-usability.

One such example is Open Runway, a company founded by Monika Desai, one of the strong members of the Boston mass customization community.  Open Runway lets you crate individual shoes (soon) and handbags (now) and have them manufactured from scratch.

The web-interface is, as said, really convinient to use. You pick one of several base models, represented as silhouettes, decide which material and color individual parts such as heels, trims, straps etc should be in and see the results of your decisions in realtime on your screen.

As you can tell from the two images below, the process of designing is fairly simple even for men. Manufacturing time is announced to be 8 weeks, but if you have the chance to get the shoe or handbag, you have always wanted, what is two more months? (even if we know from our research that a delivery time of two weeks really improves the turnover rate .. so here is room for improvement for Monika).

More about Open Runway on their website. I am curious to see how this develops and fits into teh recent trend of strong investments into custom fashion sites.

The MC Graveyard: Ideas that did not make it: Kidlandia strikes colors

Last week we gave a short insight into the work of personalized kid`s goods producer Kidlandia.

Unfortunately, it has just been announced on their website that October 22nd, 2012, has been the last day to order any of their products.

Sad truth appears to be that Kidlandia - like about 20% of startup companies that we analyzed as part of our MC500 study - could not establish itself well enough on the market to become a long-term success story.

This is perfect prove that a well-built configurator and a nice business idea alone are no guarantee for a successful mass customization venture. More factors play into it and, as we detailed in the MC500 study, solid knowledge about both these factors and their proper combination is key to make the difference between a good idea and a good business.

Update: YOUTAILOR Finds New Investment, Withdraws Insolvency Application

Just a few days ago, we reported about two mass customization companies that did not make it on their market for custom shirts. Amongst them was German start-up YOUTAILOR, one of the leading entrepreneurs in the field of online custom tailors.

Just moments ago we received news from YOUTAILOR's public relations department, informing us that the company has managed to find a new investor to support its future operations. From what we have learned, Christian Heitmeyer of Pearl Bay Beteiligungs GmbH, a German investment company already involved with ventures such as brands4friends and Allyouneed.com, has decided to commit to YOUTAILOR and help the company to stay in business.

As a result, YOUTAILOR has withdrawn their insolvency application which they had filed in July of this year.

It is great to see that an uprising German start-up gets another chance to develop and (re-)establish itself in the market of mass customized clothing. We will watch their further work and report back on their future successes - or lack thereof.

The full press release (in German language) by YOUTAILOR as sent to us today, August 20th, 2012, can be downloaded here.

The MC Graveyard: Ideas that did not make it: YouTailor & Shirts Onthefly

Although mass customization has proved to offer great opportunities to companies of all sizes, there also have been quite some failures. We will try to look into some of the companies that did not make it in a new series of posts.

And there are many of these failures! When conducting the research for the MC500 study, we learned that over the period of just one year, 17% of our original sample population went out of business. Analyzing the failure reasons showed that these startups on the one hand face "common" challenges of startups like not progressing out of the bootstrapping phase into a scalable business due to undercapitalization, wrong investment policy, overconfidence, and an insufficient business model as well as problems within the team, such as the loss of key employees.

But on the other, there are two more specific reasons for failures of MC companies, according to our research:

First, difficulties encountered by the studied MC companies may be ascertained to possible inadequacies of their toolkits. Many of the toolkits that we studied do not follow the design principles suggested as success factors by previous research: Only 55% instantly visualize consumer input, less than 20% of vendors make use of peer input in the design process, 61% do not provide information on progress of purchasing process. Only 22% allow customers to share their creations with others, just to mention a few shortcomings. The reality of toolkits clearly falls behind the academic research on design parameters of successful toolkits, suggesting a large shortcoming in transferring research into practice.
   
Secondly, problems in making mass customization work may also lay elsewhere. In an exploratory survey of 68 entrepreneurs and consultants active in the MC business (conducted in Oct. 2009), for instance, we discovered that detecting customer idiosyncratic needs and creating flexible fulfillment processes are considered as more serious concerns (average score=4.0/5 and 3.9/5) than creating toolkits that support the sales process (average score=3.5/5). This  research, the preliminary results of the Customization500 study, and many interactions with managers during case-study based research show that profiting from mass customization is not an easy task!

Two current examples have been the market for custom tailored men's shirts. The German MC blog egoo.de recently reported on two consecutive insolvencies of companies believed to be promising ventures.

First company to be hit by bankruptcy was German start-up YouTailor, one of the leading entrepreneurs in the field of online custom tailors. Despite a number of potent backers like Holtzbrinck Ventures, Tengelmann Ventures and myphotobook, YouTailor CEO Michael Urban had to file insolvency mid-June caused by financial irregularities, as eggo.de reports.

Just two weeks later, another mass-custom shirt company, SHIRTS ONTHEFLY, had to strike colors or, as egoo.de quotes the company's announcement, to declare "the mission to make high-quality bespoke shirts available for everybody" a failure. Very sad indeed, seeing how they had announced to team up with Berlin-based venture Upcload, enabling customers to measure themselves via webcam capture technology.

May there be a trend indicating that custom tailored shirts are not very high in demand? Or may it be more likely that these two did not do one of the most important things when establishing a new MC company: Seek qualified expert advise and connect with other founders and MC entrepreneurs to share experiences.

Egooo.de is speculating that the heavy use of Groupon may have facilitated the bankruptcy of YouTailor. No other company in the mass customization domain has used Groupon so often, sometimes with discounts of 50% (which makes no sense at all for me if I consider the economics of mass customization manufacturing -- there you wanted stable sales, no sudden peaks!)

For the full stories about YouTailor and SHIRTS ONTHEFLY, head over to egoo.com by blogging colleague Heiko Vogelgesang!

Interview: Andreas Krönke of Stickvogel: A Promissing B2B Approach to Service Customization

Most mass customization happens in the world of B2C, where a business sells its products to consumers which they have individualized to tehir needs. However, there are a number of B2B approaches as well, MC-companies offering customized services to other companies. I have called these business models "MC platforms", and they are one of the strongest developments in the field.

One of these MC platform is Stickvogel. The venture from Berlin, Germany, has been in the market of embroidery for almost 10 years now and has recently signed a deal with Butlers, a leading German "stuff" retailer (think of IKEA without the furniture, and located on high street). Certainly is a big success for a small MC company! Like with Butlers, Stickvogel enables vendors of embroidable goods to offer their consumers individualized products.

Core piece of their portfolio is a specialized configurator which can be integrated into the vendor's own web presence. Furthermore, Stickvogel takes the burden of production, logistics and backoffice services off their partner's shoulders, significantly lowering the barrier for companies to enter the market of mass customized products. 

Motivated by the great successes of the past years, the team around CEO Philip Siefer has expanded their offerings to engraving and canvas printing and are planning to broaden their portfolio further. 

At the MC2012 in June we had the chance to talk to Andreas Krönke, head of public relations at Stickvogel, who kindly granted us a lot of insight into their business experiences, plans for the future, and views on mass customization in general. 

FTP: Andreas, Stickvogel is going to celebrate its 10th anniversary next year. Can you tell a bit about the evolution of your business?

AK: Philip, our CEO, had the Stickvogel idea in 2003. Later Stephan joined Philip and they both started the whole business in Ilmenau, where they were studying media technology at the Ilmenau University of Technology. In the first years Stickvogel was a manufacturer of personalized textiles. The focus of the company was B2C.  Then, we got IKEA as our customer. In 2006 we started with embroidering in-store in more and more IKEA stores, primarily during the time before christmas.

Last year, our cooperation with the German retailer Butlers began and we turned more into a software startup. We developed a configurator which easily enables the user to personalize a broad range of products in a very qualitative way. At the moment we offer, of course, embroidery, but also engraving and canvas print.

FTP: Your approach is (now) one of a B2B service provider. Can you outline what exactly you offer to companies?

AK: Our most important product has become our configurator. We offer the whole software package to companies which then use it in the B2C market. But not only we offer the software with back-office. Also we produce all personalized products with our very own machinery. However, it's also possible for our partners to produce products with their own machines. You see, our processes are very flexible. Finally we can overtake the complete logistics and cover the whole service like storage, customization and shipping.

FTP: You offer full service, and deal with big players. But your team seems not to be very large. How do you handle both the workload and the risk of peaks during which your capacities might not suffice to deal with all the orders? And how scalable is the package you offer?

AK: Good question. What is very important for us, is automation. All processes have to be really optimized and we always try to make it even more easy for our team in the production. Everything should happen in the quickest way possible.

Our package is very scalable and flexible. We can satisfy big customers as well as small ones like Sox & Boxers. They sell, as one could assume by the name, socks and boxer shorts. With our service they're able to personalize their textiles. And we take care of everything: storage, embroidery, pick and pack, shipping.

FTP: Besides embroiding you do also offer printing and engraving. Did that open up new markets for you? Does it work with your existing infrastructure or are major changes needed to add these techniques to your product portfolio?

AK: Everything starts with a challenge. It's always exciting to add a new product to our portfolio. But our system is so adoptable that it was no problem to integrate these new techniques. In the future we can fulfill even more wishes of our customers and, like that, explore new markets.

FTP: With Butlers you have a rather large vendor as a business partner. Can you tell about how cooperating between a company your size and their size works out in every day business?

AK: Butlers is an exceptional company with a flat hierarchy. Furthermore they are really open minded. That makes it really easy and pleasant to work with them quite close.

FTP: Many smaller MC businesses will be eager to ask one question: How did you manage to establish contact and get into a cooperation with such a large partner?

AK: Actually we were quite lucky. We had a sales promotion at IKEA, where people could experience embroidery live. There we also attracted the attention of Wilhelm Josten, the CEO of Butlers, actually more the one of his wife. By chance Philip himself was there at this very day and so the contact was set up. Philip and Wilhelm Josten kept on talking over many weeks. Don't think that pitching only lasts ten minutes. Adjustments to fit into their value creation chain were not necessary, though. By the way, the same thing happened with IKEA, they saw us during a sales promotion at Breuninger Erfurt.

FTP: Can you talk about some of your business figures and their development over time at all?

AK: We could double or triple our turnover almost every year. In 2011 it was by 300.000 Euros. But please don't tell anyone!

FTP: Which advise would you give someone starting their own MC business?

AK: At first, be passionated about what you do. If you don't love what you do, don't do it. Always stay focused and keep the overview. And don't spend to much money. Of course, we sometimes were in difficult situations, but they've never been an obstacle for us.

FTP: How important do you rate the use of social media not only to promote ones MC-company but also interact with consumers to better position oneselve in the market?

AK: Social media is definitely a key topic. Social media is MC in the internet. We're using many social media channels like of course Facebook and Twitter, where we post contributions about twice a week. But we want to increase our communication more and more, provided that our fans and followers like that. We also really like to get feedback or messages via Twitter and Facebook. But we do not only use these services. We also like YouTube to give people the possibility to peek behind the scences of Stickvogel. And we have a corporate blog that you can find on our website stickvogel.com. The use of social media is very naturally to us and it became completely common. We also use social media for internal communication. In one sentence: We love social media.

FTP: Are you considering to open up a B2C web-shop of your own, with a configurator like a "classical" MC company?

AK: Yes, we do! Keep your eyes open. Silberäffchen [Silver Monkey] will go live soon. It is a web-shop specialized on engraving of silver products. [UPTADE: Silberäffchen has gone into beta and can be accessed via www.silberaeffchen.de]

FTP: Are there any other new products or projects in planning for you? What can we expect next?

AK: We will acquire lots of more customers in the next weeks and develop the next version of our configurator, an even better back-office and a magento plug-in. And we hope that we can offer more MC techniques. To not discriminate against other animals we want to launch an online shop for every animal. Silberäffchen is just the beginning. Besides we always have some fun projects. But those are mostly secret - for now.

FTP: Andreas, I hope your new projects will work out as well for you as your past ones and I am sure we will keep hearing about you.

All details about Stickvogel can be found on their company website, www.stickvogel.com! And to get a sneak peak of what their production looks like, here is a video for you!

 

Featured Companies from the MC500 (Part 7): Proper Cloth: Custom Dress Shirts the Easy (and Affordable) Way

In our series of postings introducing companies that performend very well in our Customization 500 study, we are introducing the next mass customizer. Remember:  The order of these feature postings is more or less randomly!

 

Also, just in case you somehow missed it, the MC2012, largest MC/OI conference in German language, will be heading off soon (28th/29th of june). So if you are going to be in the area, understand German and want to meet some really interesting MC/OI enthusiasts, the conference website has all the information you need. Would be glad to see you there in person!

Today: Dress Yourself with the Latest Fashion, Decide What is "in Fashion" Yourself

As I said in my last MC500 Post about Mission Bicycle, summer - if that's what you want to call it - has finally arrived in Germany. While (unfortunately) this does not mean that work would magically finish itself, at least one gets a chance to spend the evening outdoors (sometimes), may it be sitting on the terrace of a nice restaurant or taking a walk in the park.

Whether it will be the office or the park for you, what always comes in handy is a well-tailored, perfectly fitting dress shirt. While each of you will have a different idea of what "perfectly fitting" means, one place might have you covered for all your individual shirt needs.

Proper Cloth, founded in Delaware in 2008, offers a pretty complete customization experience when it comes to dress shirts, a fashion article which, as many of you will agree, tends to just not fit perfectly at some point or another. Proper Cloth's promiss is exactly that, a perfectly fitting shirt, tailored to your needs, based on a really well-made configurator which even shines where others lack by offering assistance in finding out your individual measures in various ways. Oh and, if configurators should not be your thing (unlikely as that is, seeing how you are visiting this website), they offer a variety of preconfigured shirt as well.

So whether you need a new shirt to wear with your favorite suit or a stylish untucked one for leasure, a visit at propercloth.com might be worth it for you.

Note: Please see this post for detailed information on how to interpret the above data.

Getwear: New custom jeans website combines many "best practice" elements of online co-design toolkits

Custom jeans have been one of the pioneering offering in mass customization, and I have reported about them several times. Indeed, it has been the Custom Jeans offering of Levi Strauss that got me interested in mass customization at the first place (Seeing it in 1994 in NYC), and so I was quite sad when Levi closed its MC business.

But the market seems to get more mature now, and while there already are quite some companies on the web, there always is room for someone new, especially if they get it better than the rest.

This seems to be the case with GETWEAR.com, a custom jeans site targeting the US market (but they ship to Europe and Asia, too). They just launched last week. While I still cannot judge the product quality, the website seems to be very carefully designed and somehow a "best of breed" of best practices for a good co-design toolkit. And their price point (starting at about $99) is truly MASS customization.

CEO of Getwear is Tatyana Kanzaveli, a well connected woman in the Silicon Valley, but the strategist and concept developer behind the site is Yaakov Karda, who came up with the idea after his studies in Fashion Management in Italy.

I asked him what how is Getwear different to the existing custom jeans companies out there.

Yaakov: The main difference is that other projects are (and, as far as I know) about "custom fit" and Getwear is about "custom design". Besides that, none of them is social. It was you (customer) and the company. Basically, it is an analogue of web based "atelier". There's not much fun in buying atelier made clothing for young people; the concept looks and sounds outdated.

Getwear is all about social commerce. From my point of view, mass customization has perfect potential if coupled with community but will not succeed on the large scale if it is not. All other "custom jeans" businesses mostly target people with special requirements (and though an established need for a custom product). It's a very limited market (and with harsh competition).

Unlike them, Getwear targets regular people and most of our clients never (probably) thought of having their jeans custom made. We aim to establish a brand that will compete not with other existing custom jeans projects, but with "big" denim brands such as Diesel, G-Star e.t.c.

Well, this is a bold statement, but there website really is state-of-the art (definitely a best practice candidate for our Customization500 list). The site is very well planned, and really combines many elements both with regard to co-design of an individual item and with regard to sharing and community features.

The co-design tool was developed in collaboration with Artem Gorbunov's Design Bureau, a highly regarded Moscow based studio that specializes in web & interface design. According to Yaakov, they already had two iterations but they are not yet done, so it's a work in progress.

Here are some elements that I liked especially from their site:

• Great inspiration and catalog to give you orientation and ideas.
• Senseful visualization balancing between usability and realistic views.
• Different models and sizes already in the co-design toolkit, not just in the measurement part.
• Great details. Look at the selection of buttons: Options are shown before selected color, nit just generically.
• Lot's of social media connections right out of the configurator
• Option to offer your design to others, earning a $10 bonus every time it is ordered. One of the few sites that put this kind of P2P interaction into practice .

But a great custom product is only as good as the firm's ability to turn the virtual design into a real product. So I asked Yaakov to share a bit more about their production system. Production is in India in a dedicated factory, rum by Nikhil Bafna, who was Yaakov's classmate in Italy and is the VP of Production. They promise delivery times of not more than two weeks (in the US) for a truly custom made jeans, which really sets a strong benchmark!

Yaakov: First of all, we employ unique parametric pattern making system that produces ready for cutting patterns in a matter of seconds. That saves a lot of time. Besides that we have a specially dedicated production unit that doesn't do any other work. Jeans are delivered with UPS and it only adds around 3 days for delivery (within these 14). 

We aim to further reduce delivery timing to one week (or less for basic items) in future. I believe that fast fulfillment is one of the key success factors for any mass customization business.

I totally agree on the last sentence. Looking forward to observe the future developments of this company!

#MCPC2011 Business Seminar: Setting Up a Mass Customization System at #Skyou, #Bene AG and #Selve

On November 16th, the MCPC 2011 conference kicks off at the Marriot SFO Airport, San Francisco. In this series of postings, we introduce our speakers at the business seminars of the conference.

This session will focus on the different business models that are behind the mass customization trend.

Brennan Mulligan, Founder & CEO, Skyou
What I Learned from Setting Up Five Successful MC Companies

While mass customization can be seen as an established business model we still see often little scale in its execution. At the same time, many new ventures and established businesses alike face the challenge to establish a supply chain fitted for mass customization – and everyone seems to go through the same learning cycle again. In his talk, Brennan Mulligan will propose a solution, reflecting on his experiences in leading many successful mass customization businesses since 1993.

Karl Berger, Vice President Engineering, Bene AG
Developing Solution Spaces for Mass Customization

Solution Space Development is one of the core activities of a successful mass customizer, clearly defining what it is going to offer and what it is not. The presentation will explain how Bene, a leading European office furniture provider, has developed a special approach to understand and serve the idiosyncratic needs of its customers, to develop the solution space. Karl Berger will show how different constraints work with each other, and how a of organizational layers helps to execute different solution spaces in the organization.

Claudia Kisserling, CEO, Selve
Illissa Howard, Founder, Milk and Honey Shoes
Establishing a Mass Customization Factory in China

This joint presentation is delivered by two experienced entrepreneurs in mass customization footwear, representing selve, the Germany-based category leader in the field, and Milk&Honey, a recent Hong Kong based startup. Claudia and Ilissa will first share insights into the market for customization in this field, discussing the Women’s fashion footwear market size and growth areas, global reach via online configurator, and the challenges and opportunities associated with that. Then, Claudia will share here experiences in setting up an own manufacturing plant in china, after seven years of manufacturing of high quality custom women's shoes in Italy. She will discuss the pros and cons, the do's and don'ts and her experiences of setting up and running a custom shoe factory in China.

Please find the complete program at the official MCPC 2011 website.

#MCPC2011 Business Seminar: Building & Growing a Mass Customization Business at #Rickshaw Bagworks and #You Bar

On November 16th, the MCPC 2011 conference kicks off at the Marriot SFO Airport, San Francisco. In this series of postings, we introduce our speakers at the business seminars of the conference.

In this panel, three experienced entrepreneurs in mass customization will share their best practices on what did work and what not.

Mark Dwight, Founder & CEO, Rickshaw Bagworks
Design for Mass Customization: Real World Approaches for Design and Manufacturing

Mass customization comes in many shapes and sizes. Mark Dwight employs mass customization techniques in his small messenger bag manufacturing company, Rickshaw Bagworks, based in San Francisco. Dwight founded Rickshaw specifically to pursue a strict build-to-order operational model, as opposed to the traditional build-to-stock practice common in the fashion industry. At Rickshaw, mass customization is the foundation of the product design and development process. All product platforms are based upon four key design principles: (1) Decouple function and fashion; (2) Isolate complex core functional elements in a common, mass-producible "chassis"; (3) Save product "personality" for the final assembly step; (4) Add optional functional upgrades and fashion elements from a collection of "bolt-on" accessories. Based upon this design methodology, Rickshaw produces a family of full-featured, customizable computer carrying briefcases and backpacks at very competitive prices in its San Francisco headquarters. The benefits of this strategy include: zero finished goods inventory, zero inventory risk, minimum SKU count, vastly reduced forecasting complexity, ability to outsource most of the labor intensive work while insourcing all of the customization, price/performance flexibility, and fast turnaround of highly custom orders.

Anthony Flynn, Founder & CEO, You Bar
You Bars: Profiting from the Mega-Trend of Food Customization

Detailing You Bar's journey from my mother's kitchen to an 8,200 square foot commercial warehouse, this presentation focuses on how the customer and company have become less polarized. Customization obliges the customer to become co-creator and innovator, necessitating a dialogue between customer and company which allows each to better satisfy the evolving needs of the other.

Speaker T.B.A., Please Check Conference Website for Details
Investing in the Customization Trend

Mass customization start-ups have become subject to some major interest of Venture Capital firms. In this presentation, a member of the VC communities share some insights on the market for mass customization from this perspective and why mass customization and co-creation are important drivers of successful future business models.

Please find the complete program at the official MCPC 2011 website.

#MCPC2011 Business Seminar: The Tools for Open Innovation at #TechShop, #Idea Couture and #Ford

On November 16th, the MCPC 2011 conference kicks off at the Marriot SFO Airport, San Francisco. In this series of postings, we introduce our speakers at the business seminars of the conference.

Implementing open innovation is not always easy. This session will provide a focused few on approaches and tools to utilize the benefits of open innovation.

Mark Hatch, CEO, TechShop
BOOM! An innovation Explosion: How to Change the World Through Open Access to the Tools of Invention 

The presentation will share how TechShop changed the world through open access to the tools of invention… and provide a guide on practical ways to leverage this platform for your organization. Open source, the cloud, ubiquitous connectivity, search and find efficiencies, and powerful cheap processing have been driving the rapid acceleration of innovation in any field touched by computers and communication media. Now, with the advance of inexpensive access to extremely cheap, powerful and easy to use tools, the invention of physical products has never been easier, cheaper, or speedier… particularly if you have a $100 a month membership to TechShop. Mark presents five technologies prototyped and built at TechShop that have already started to change our world. He reviews the drivers of this new capability and then explores how you can leverage this new service.

Leah Hunter, Global Head of Insights and Innovation, Idea Couture
Making Co-Creation Strategic

The concepts of open innovation, mass customization and co-creation are often used interchangeably and raise new questions and challenges that highlight the need to understand the variables in their design of mechanisms, business processes and the economic implications for organizations. Leah Hunter will introduce the consumer co-creation value chain, a model that is used to analyze and understand the mechanics of co-creation. She will further illustrate its value by sharing Idea Couture's experiences in designing co-creation strategies. What are the differences between crowd wisdom versus collective intelligence; crowdsourcing ecosystems and market co-creation; motivations and creative incentive design; task characteristics and task design? Leah's presentation will align the strategic intent of the business to a co-creation strategy.

TJ Giuli, Technical Expert Ford Research and Advanced Engineering, Ford Motor Company
Leveraging Open Innovation to Create a Customized Driving Experience

Ford Motor Company, a global automotive industry leader based in Dearborn,Mich., manufactures or distributes automobiles across six continents. With
about 176,000 employees and about 80 plants worldwide, the company's automotive brands include Ford, Lincoln, and Mercury. Recently, Ford opens its research doors to external contributors, tapping into minds at universities and other organizations outside the automotive industry for the next best idea for, e.g., in-vehicle connectivity and infotronics. One of Dr. Giuli's latest open innovation projects is American Journey 2.0, which paired up Ford and University of Michigan students who were challenged to build a new class of social networking apps for the vehicle during a 12-week course. The winning app made its way into a Ford Fiesta for the ultimate test drive to California for the 2010 Maker Faire, the largest do-it-yourself event of its kind. In his presentaton, Dr. Giuli will share this and other experiences in open innovation at Ford.

Please find the complete program at the official MCPC 2011 website.

#MCPC2011 Program Highlights - Mass Customization and Open Innovation in the Fashion Industries

In a series of postings, we present some of the program highligths of the MCPC 2011 conference. The following is just one of more than 50 sessions we will host on Nov 16-19 in San Francisco, CA.

Since the beginning of the MCPC conference series, clothing and footwear products have been has discussed extensily during this event. Also, just by looking onto the numbers, these industries are leading the mass customization movement. At the same time, some of the early pioneers in Crowdsourcing, Threadless, also focused on this industry.

A dedicated track at the MCPC2011 will provide a closer look on this topic.

Sessions 5.2 and 6.2 (Nov 19): A Special Focus on the Fashion Industries

Why Customization of Footwear is Not Fit for Masses

Market facts prove that, despite a certain number of valorous entrepreneurs are there to exploit the advantages of the new business model, the benefits of personalization of products have not yet reached the shoe wearing masses. Sergio Dulio will present the example of a new Italian brand in the field of luxury bespoke men shoes and the presentation of its technical and market expansion plans, it will be discussed why customization and masses, at least in the field of footwear, don’t’ seem to go together as expected and a theory will be formulated to support the idea that, possibly, this is the right approach to a consumer centric shoe world.

Customization in Apparel Design

Advanced customization and 3D visualization are in the core of the latest planned solutions to enhance customer's shopping experience and brand loyalty, and with the help of advanced GPUs the industry is a step closer in creating a better, more precise design and shopping environment. Yoram Burg (Optitex) will present and discuss the latest projects his company is involved in that include deploying the 3D customized solutions in the worlds of movies, home sewing, apparel design, animation and art work, and give a preview on the next level of solutions currently in development by OptiTex.

ErtlRenz Sport Shoes World - Adapted to Improve the Customer's Performance

While many professional athletes are outfitted over long periods of time by their sponsoring sports brand through the same service people, the “normal” customer typically buys his standardized equipment by individual picks from different stores. Dirk Rutschmann (Corpus-e), Sven Renz and Wolfgang Richter (ErtlRenz) will report from the ErtlRenz Sport Shoes World and present how they embrace the customer over his personal sports career providing him individual sport shoes for maximum performance and comfort like a pro.

E-Co-Creation for Fashion

The Web 2.0 revolution is changing perceptions and influencing a younger generation, but can co-creation challenge traditional design methods for fashion and promote sustainability, and can designing together enable the democratization of fashion? Jen Ballie, Philip Delamore (London College of Fashion) will present a mapping of co-creation within a fashion context, using participatory practice methods. A series of case studies will be used to define co-creation communities, the role of the individual and the sustainable benefits of working together. The viewpoint of both the designer and consumer will be used to illustrate their role and relationship, and to define methods and toolkits for how they can work together.

CoReNET - Value Co-Creation of Small Series Customized Healthy, Fashionable Clothing, Footwear and Assessories

In this presentation, Dieter Stellmach (DITF Denkendorf) will give an insight into CoReNET - Customer-ORiented and Eco-friendly NETworks for healthy fashionable goods: A toolset and first practical experiences for value co-creation of small series customised healthy fashionable clothing, footwear and accessories.

The Fitting of Pants

When fitting pants, a garment can have the correct horizontal and vertical dimensions, but not fit properly. This is a particular problem at the crotch, where there is a saddle point on the abstracted 3D form of the body, where the front and back of the body are joined in the crotch area and one leg transitions through the crotch area to the other. Bonny Carmicino has determined that these fit problems are the result of patterns that do not properly fit the crotch curve and are not properly balanced and will present new methods of creating the proper crotch curve and balancing pants, both of which produce excellent results on subjects of all shapes (including “normal” and also atypically- and asymmetrically-shaped subjects).

Configurator for Apparel Manufactoring within the Mass Customization Program

Companies need to acquire and manage a knowledge base of consumers’ needs and preferences in order to meet, even surpass, customer's expectations. In the fashion & clothing industry, mass customization is not generally well understood or implemented due to difficulties related to measurements, pattern adaptation, and inflexible manufacturing processes. Jocelyn Bellemare (Université du Québec à Montréal), Serge Carrier and Pierre Baptiste (Montreal University) will present their identification of the fundamental variables and data necessary to produce custom-made clothing, the development of a configurator based on such data, and how to enable the efficient transmission of configurator generated information to computerized production systems.

--- And these are just some of the talks on this industry!! check the full program for more!!

Listen to the full content of these talks at the MCPC 2011, Marriot SFO Airport, San Francisco, Nov 16-19, 2011:

- Conference Website and Registration (reducted rates until Sept 30)

- All info here in one compact MCPC flyer

- Conference hotel and travel (rooms fill quickly, book now!)

- All posts about the conference in my blog

New German Fashion Customization Site is Online: Limberry offers custom design for women's clothing

I have to admit that I first have been skeptical: A young entrepreneur, with a passion for fashion but no design background, trying to enter the challenging market of made-to-measure apparel that both fits and is fashionable.

I first met Sibilla Kawala on the CYP2011 event in Berlin, where she presented us her idea of limberry.de. Now, a few months later, her business is up and running.

The site limberry.de is online, and you can order custom-made blazers, skirts, dresses, and dirndls.

I got a personal tour of the site today, and I have to say I am impressed: Good configurator, nice visualization, very professional pictures, clean design. The measurement process could need some improvement, but it is functional and should work (at least for the target group of fashion savfy women).

Also the promised performance is very competitive:

• All products are "Made in Germany" - so local production, local jobs, and good quality!
• Delivery time of 2 weeks.
• No shipping cost.
• Frugal innovation, all self-financed and put together with a great dedicated team.

I wish Sibilla all the best for her new company. I am sure that we still will hear a lot from her in the MC community!

CYO 2011: European Networking Event on Mass Customisation and the Creative Consumer, Berlin, May 30-31

This year will become the year of mass customization. First, the MCPC 2011 conference promises to become the biggest networking and knoweldge event ever. But it will be only at the end of November 2011... But before, there is a great opportunity for everyone in Europe to meet and network:

Supported by the European Commission, a consortium of European companies and research organisations is hosting the Create Your Own 2011 (CYO 2011) event in Berlin, Germany, May 30 and 31st, 2011.

The term "create your own" denotes a growing trend of start-ups and corporate entrepreneurship in Europe to create offerings catering to the creative consumer and serving the personalisation movement.

Together with local post-industrial design collective Cookies And Code and RWTH Aachen, EU research projects OpenGarment and SERVIVE will bring the vibrant global conversation about the future of making and selling personalised goods and services to Berlin.

The group is presenting its first annual "Create Your Own" event on Monday May 30, 2011 at the IMA Design Village in Berlin (17-20 h).  The opening event will feature over fifty co-creation entrepreneurs, makers, researchers, technology experts, policy maker, and investors from around Europe. A press conference and special exhibition will present the makers and shapers of personalisation and customisation in Europe to a wider audience,

On the following day, May 31, a full day business seminar will provide a detailed look at innovative European start-ups that are quite literally giving the people what they want. At the seminar, plenary presentations and panels will look into the market for mass customisation, new business models connected with the trend, and the latest technologies that make it happen.

The event "Create Your Own 2011" is a unique opportunity to explore the reality and future behind individualisation, co-creation, and personalisation -- mega trends that are shaping the European consumption landscape. 

The CYO event has three core objectives.

1. Give participants a thorough overview of what is happening today, what can be learned from the past, and what future already is here from key thought leaders in the field.
2. Help people in different fields of practice to explore how they can use mass customisation, co-creation and personalisation to get more out of what they do as a creative producer. This purpose will be served by a special workshop, the "MC incubator". 
3. Showcase some of the best and most promising products and customization offerings to a general public.

As the event is supported by the European Commission, registration is Euro 200,- only if you register early.Visiting the CYO2011 exhibition is free and open to everyone.

All information and registration at http://www.cyo2011.com

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SPECIAL OFFER: If your company is offering mass customization products or services, participate at the CYO 2011 exhibition. This will be a great opportunity to showcase your offerings to a wider public, the CYP 2011 participants, and a large group of invited journalists and multiplicators. Participation at the exhibition is only 250,- Euro (including the 200,- Euro participation fee at the business seminar), but place is limited. For any exhibition requests, just contact Evalotte Lindgens at [email protected]

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Spreadshirt: New online-configurator offers better user feeling and more design options

A guest posting by Stefan Thallmaier and Simon Strassburger

Leipzig-based company Spreadshirt AG is Europe’s largest producer of customized apparel. As one of the first large-scale MC companies in Europe, the company has risen steadily from its modest beginnings in 2004 to currently around 300 employees and production sites in Germany, Poland and the US. Core of the company is the configuration toolkit. Within the next weeks, Spreadshirt is launching a new edition of this configurator. Two research collaborators of my Aachen group, Stefan Thallmaier and Simon Strassburger (staff researchers at the HHL Center for Leading Innovation and Cooperation  in Leipzig) got the opportunity for a preview. Here is their report:

On August 10, Spreadshirt gave us the opportunity to a first look the beta version of its new configurator, the ‘Confomat’.  The main reasons for designing a new T-shirt configurator are the increasing user expectations and opportunities for performance optimizations.

In their presentation, Developer Frank Alic and Product Manager Robert Schulz stressed that the core element of the online user interaction system has been changed in several instances. “Usability has significantly increased, as we analyzed more than 350 suggestions from community feedback and customer reclamations over the last years and worked closely with selected operators of our partner shops.”

As a result of an improved visibility, the shirt is now centered on screen with required toolkits arranged around it. To reduce complexity of the ‘Confomat’ and to prevent the risk of size or design misinterpretations, users are now able to obtain instant feedback in case of misconfigurations.

Additionally the newly developed configurator offers a wider range of customization options. To name one example: users are now able to change colors from one letter to the other within one word. These customization opportunities are not available in older versions of the online interface. Hence the solution space is increased to a large extent.

From a research perspective it will be interesting, how users are able to handle the new customization variety. According to spreadshirt the new configurator also affects the systematization of diverse landing pages in the online shop, which support customers to get a first inspiring thought on how to design the shirt.

The new options for customizing the shirt also directly affect the average production time per shirt or accessories. This proofs once more the complexity of the development project for the new configurator, which has been undertaken by spreadshirt. All departments and production steps are directly affected by a comparable small change in the user interface – like the possibility of changing colors in the same word  (from the perspective of the customer).

The new configurator is currently in open beta status, going live within the next weeks. In order to see, feel and test the ‘Confomat’ just follow this link: http://www.spreadshirt.de/-C6221

Lessons for Start-Ups in Mass Customization, As Told by Blank Label to The New York Times

This week, The New York Times had a very nice documentation by Amy Wallace about Fan Bi from Blank Label, a Shanghai and Boston based mass customization entrepreneur in the apparel industry. While there are so many custom men's shirts site on the web already (next to t-shirts the most crowded category, as our Customization500 study has shown), Blank Label has found a place in this category.

The article very neatly summarizes some of the motivations and key learnings I have heard often from MC Entrepreneurs:

(1) Set up operations first: Blank Label shirts are sewn to customers’ specifications and delivered anywhere in the world in about four weeks from Shanghai. Before opening the business, he really invested in setting operations up, and also travels personally to the factory to oversee manufacturing (indeed, it seems from the website that in the moment he is living in the factory). This is, in my experience, a key success factor of mass customization start-ups: Focus on getting the stuff produced, not just sold! And this also at times, when the business picks up and you have to scale it.

(2) Start very lean: "We’ve focused on being very bootstrap, very lean," says Fan Bi in the NYT article. This is important to finance a slow start: In the article, he says his business has sold about 450 shirts. Recently, it has seen a big bump in traffic, with orders of about 10 shirts a day. He says the company makes money on every shirt – but at $50 a piece, you need to sell a lot to really make a decent income.

(3) Focus on the the emotional value proposition: "how expressive something is": Fan Bi learned:
"People really like a Blank Label shirt because they can say, ‘I had a part in creating this". On the blank label website, this is called the "Co-Creation Custom Revolution" (just another fancy synonym for mass customization).

(4) Don't trust in venture capital: They first tried to get outside investments, but did not succeed. "To be honest, we couldn’t," Mr. Bi is quoted in the article "We were two very young guys who had no track record." So Fan Bi financed the site with about $10,000 in savings. But even if you have a track record, in my experience it is very difficult to attract venture capital to a manufacturing-based product business. So focus on other sources or private funds. And stay lean (see above).

(5) Be very customer centric: Communicate directly with customers is a number one goal at Blank Label. This sounds obvious, but is not: Only about 25% o all mass customization companies on the web offer direct customer support. Depending on the time of day, Fan Bi answers customers' calls himself.  And the article reveals another very good practice: "When he is awake, he also activates a feature that sends instant messages to customers who have been on the site for more than 90 seconds. Need help?, he asks. For several hours a day, he and his partners chat with customers about what they like and don’t like on the site.

Other success factors I would add which were not covered in the article:

• Get the market positioning right. What is the differentiation of your product ? (hint: just that fact that it can be customized is it not).
   .
• Make a great web-interface that is easy to use and represents your final product. We now have so much academic research about mass customization configurators. Put it in practice!
   .
• Think about a clever brand name that really sticks. While the majority of mass customization sites have a "my", "personal", or "custom" in their brand names, all category leader have not.

Read the full article here, or come to the MIT Smart Customization Seminar to meet 100 other entrepreneurs and managers doing mass customization!

Designed to Surprise -- EU Conference on Consumer Goods Research Brings Three Major Research Programs Together - Free Participation

Designed to Surprise: How Strategic Research and Innovation can Extend Europe’s Leadership in Design-based Consumer Goods on the Global Market

European Conference on Consumer Goods Research

Hotel Bloom, Brussels, 4th February 2010 -- Free Registration

For this first time, three major European bodies representing some of the main fields of application for mass customization meet in a joint conference to discuss visions and strategies for current and future European Consumer Goods research.

The European Technology Platform for the Future of Textiles and Clothing, the European Platform for Sports and Innovation, and the European Footwear Products and Processes Technology Platform jointly organize this international conference featuring high-level speeches from industry, leading researchers and the European Commission (I got the challenging task to provide the closing remarks and summarize the discussion over the day).

In previous meetings preparing the conference, mass customization and personalization, but also customer co-design and consumer co-creation, frequently popped up as some of the key trends unifying these areas.

During the conference, ten major European research projects in the field will present their current developments in the area, with Open Garments, Dorothy, Fit4U, and our own SERVIVE project presenting pure mass customization research.

With this first event we expect to have an important impact on future EU research & innovation policies at a time when important EU policy decisions such as the EU2020 Plan are under preparation and new European Commission leaders start their work.

Thanks to this cross-platform collaboration which started in early 2009 and which we intend to strengthen and deepen in the future, interesting research funding opportunities are expected to emerge during the remainder of the 7th Framework Program (starting from 2010).

This event is the place to be to learn more about this and to make contacts for future collaborations -- and best of all, participation is free! But we have an upper limit of approximately 200 participants and places will be assigned on a “first come, first served basis”.

Download the conference flyer & program and the registration form

MCPC 2009 Conference Report Day 4: Fashion Lab: Anna Ruohonen, Selve, Servive, Rivolta on why customization is the true luxury in fashion

The last day of the conference was dedicated to three labs, which provided an interactive platform for discussion around specialized fields. I joined the Fashion Lab.

We were a very nice group of people, ranging from luxury companies LV, Selve, or Paris-designer Anna Ruohonen to streetwear labels like Converse and Spreadshirt, from great students and professors from the Helsinki design and fashion scene, from specialist consultants like Sergio Dulio (footwear) to my academic colleagues from RWTH-TIM in Aachen.

The day started with a presentation by Sirkku Liukkonen, responsible for customization at the  Helsinki concept store of Anna Ruohonen. "From atelier work to mass customization", so the title of the journey Sirkku described.  Anna Ruohonen is a Paris-based fashion designer with two clothing labels carrying her name, both for men and women. Her style follows the tradition of Finnish design: the forms are architectural, the cuts are considered, and simplicity and sustainability are key concepts.

They started with customization for some retail clients and slowly moved into the consumer business after opening a mass customization concept store in Helsinki in April 2009. Products are produced together with the general items; all are produced on-demand in Paris. The popularity of the customization offering largely exceeded expectations. "Better fitting is the key word", Sirkku said. No wonder, as they offer the customization service at no additional fee. It is a "premium service for free".

An interesting debate started at this point: Conventionally, "sustainable fashion" is an oxymoron: Fashion is all about change and getting the latest stuff … But as Sirkku explained, sustainability is more than just using eco textiles: "If an item fits well and people really like it, people really will use it for a long time". And Sergio Dulio added: "Mass customization equals sustainability: the amount of products which are not sold corresponds to such a huge batch of energy without no use at all." An interesting debate that we will continue during the next conferences.

The presentation about Anna Ruohonen started a second stream of discussion (along the solution space dimension of our framework): How to balance between the design aesthetics of the brand and the vision of a star designer like Anna Ruohonen: Shall Anna allow the modifications of her dresses that they are suited for customers with body dimensions not seen in her patterns before? Where does the "dream" of a customer ends? What will this mean for a brand?

This is a question that also drives Claudia Kieserling, one of the longest members of our community. Claudia is founder and president of Selve, the first and leading customizer for ladies shoes in the world. "Luxury is a key characteristic of mass customization", she said. "No matter what price you ask, consumers see it as pure luxury." This is an interesting turning point in the discussion, as previously, we saw as one objective – or even as part of the definition – of mass customization that it should reach a large "mass".Claudia reported that her customers are coming for both fashion and fit (often starting for fit, and returning for fashion). Some of her best (and wealthy) customers have ordered more than 100 shoes --- making the shopping of a creation process of her own. For her, "time and experience are the new luxury" – an impression shared by Kamel from Louis Vuitton.  

A final example of experience was provided by Sergio Dulio. He has consulted in the past months extensively to an Italian entrepreneur who wants to revolutionize the way how custom-made shoes in the upper segment are sold and produced. A concept / testing store has just been open at the famous Via della Spiga (#17) in Milan.

Under the name of "Rivolta", customers there can experience one of the most advanced configurators in the world. You not just can design your shoes like on your iPhone on huge screens, but also fully try your custom shoes virtually on your own body in a virtual mirror. There also will be an iPhone Application to customize your shoes on the run! Shoes are expensive (Euro 1400 an up), but targeted to business people who have expensive custom shoes anyway, but want to purchase them with a new twist and different level of service and experience. Here, the act of purchasing the shoe becomes a luxury experience.

The Fashion Lab further had a number of interesting live demos. Thorsten Harzer and Moritz Wellige from my group at RWTH Aachen demonstrated a financial model to calculate the impact of mass customization in the clothing industry, developed as part of our Servive project. We could see a demo of a 3D knitting machine -- the complement to rapid manufacturing and laser sintering in the fashion industry ("data in, pullover out"). We got a demonstration of the Corpus.e Foot Scanner and its application at Pakerson, another upscale customizer of men's shoes with a successful store in St. Petersburg.

All in all, a great finale of a great conference!

Zazzle Launches in Germany to Continue European Rollout

Yesterday at around midnight, Zazzle.de went online, the Zazzle platform in German language. Being German, I of course were especially appealed (even if the translation at some places still is bumpy, it is difficult to translate the American startup slang in German, I suppose).

In addition to supporting the German market with full German-language translation, www.Zazzle.de will base its transactions in Euros and buyers will not need to pay additional taxes or customs duties beyond the product price. Customers on the www.Zazzle.de website will enjoy fast delivery of their order to any address in Germany at competitive prices. But the zazzle.de website will be a virtual front end, with all information being managed from the US.

But an interesting feature, and one that make's a lot of sense, is the promise of Zazzle to offer localized merchandising featuring German Sellers and content relevant to the German market. In the moment, this is Oktoberfest beerfest stuff.

The also promise a standard delivery across Germany at competitive prices with delivery typically in 5-7 days, with Express delivery in about three days (hence just a bit slower than Spreadshirt or other Germany-based companies).

I am curious to see how zazzle.de will develop and are happy about another strong case close to my home.

In the press release, Zazzle offers some more information about their business development. Zazzle's recent statistics include:

--  Monthly unique visitors to the Zazzle websites now exceed 12 million;
--  140+ percent year-over-year traffic growth;
--  Total number of members is 5 million+;
--  Total items shipped is more than 11 million;
--  Leading on-demand custom products marketplace in terms of traffic
    rank, page views, and other key metrics, according to alexa.com

PS: Zazzle will present at the MCPC 2009 conference in Helsinki about their recent achievements and future plans!

Spreadshirt: Quality and NPS are King! Visit at Spreadshirt's Leipzig Headquarters

Last week, just before my departure to HBS where I participate in the 2009 GCPCL, I had the opportunity to spend a full day at Spreadshirt's new German Headquarters and factory in Leipzig. Three colleagues from the Aachen team and I had meetings with Spreadshirt CEO Jana Eggers, Communication Guru Andreas Miles, Company Speaker Eike Sievert and other members of the Spreadshirt team. After a briefing we started our day with a tour through the factory, followed by more than six hours of discussions and talks about the various business aspects. It was great fun and learning.

Spreadshirt went beta in April 2001 as the brainchild of Lukas Gadowski, at this time a student in Leipzig, Germany. Their PR sheet calls "Spreadshirt the "things you wear" answer to the growing desire for personal branding -- letting customers quickly create one-of-a-kind, high-quality, expressive apparel." With t-shirts as the company's specialty, customers can create branded merchandise with a range of around 80 printable items, from sweatshirts and jackets to t-shirts and dog-shirts. Spreadshirt also is owner of La Fraise, the European Threadless clone.

Next to the idea of mass customization, the possibility for users to open their own online shop to sell their creation to others has been part of the business from the start. Spreadhsirt thus is part of the new generation of mass customization companies that not just let consumers design a custom product but also harvest a niche opportunity for a specific design. It was a nice opportunity to contrast Spreadshirt to my visit at Zazzle earlier this spring. More than 500.000 Spreadshirt-powered shops are open for business today.

A great example of how Spreadshirt enables new kind of business ideas is the CNN Headline shirt, one of Spreadshirt's great successes. Since 2008, CNN one-off headline T-shirts. On their homepage, you can click a little mini T-shirt icon next to a headline, and poof, get a T-shirt made with that headline, time-stamp, and CNN logo on it. The initiative has been nominated as one of the Top-3 marketing ideas in 2008, and until today, thousands of different T-shirts have been created, all one of a kind and on demand in one day. But exactly the same infrastructure is also offered to consumers who want to create their own headline store with headlines from their local school paper.

These are my key takeaways about Spreadshirt from my visit:

1. Quality rules. While at my visit at Zazzle everyone talked about their great online technologies, at Spreadshirt everyone was obsessed with quality. Almost every statement started with "Spreadshirt wants to be the quality leader in our segment" et al. Continuous quality in products and printing is a number one objective for Spreadshirt. They even have a sophisticated testing lab to test all possible fabric / color combinations before a new shirt or fabric goes online. While focus of quality sounds like a great statement, though, I am not sure whether customers really always honor superior quality in this product category. Would be worth while a more detailed study!

2. Self expression is a HUGE market. When asked what is the particular product they sell, Jana frequently answers "self expression". And this is a very nice way to look on mass customization (bringing it also in live with Joe Pine's recent thinking on authenticity). Expressing ourselves is an inherent demand of every human being. Offering custom goods in a meaningful way is a great way to tap into this market. But not many companies are positioning their MC offering in such a way.

3. It's all about metrics. Next to quality, the company totally went NPS. The net promoter score is an industry measure to identify customer satisfaction and loyalty. And as enthusiastic customers are the best prerequisite for sustained growth, Spreadshirt has a good reason to confidently look ahead: Spreadshirt's NPS of 42% places it in the top quarter of many famous online firms.

The NPS (http://www.netpromoter.com) is based on the assumption that the customer's willingness to recommend a company to others is directly related to their satisfaction and loyalty. The value of the NPS is determined with the help of one question: "How likely is it that you would recommend company XY to a friend or colleague?" The possible answers range from 0 (unlikely) to 10 (very likely). Enthusiastic customers that decided on 9 or 10 are identified as promoters.  Would be nice to have a study on NPS ov various mass customization companies to compare.

4. Focus on one category. While Zazzle and Cafepress, Spreadshirt's main competitors, have a wide array of products in their assortments, Spreadshirt focuses on apparel (or "things you can wear"). In this category, however, they really have the long tail of products. But talking to their warehouse manager confirmed my old experience: Whenever you give ´plenty of colors to people to choose from, they select while, black, and blue.

5. Mass customization manufacturing is personal. While we were visiting during a slow time of the year (summer vacation period, no special holidays), the factory was quite busy in processing orders. Most orders are fulfilled in a rather complex – and human labor demanding – way by printing the design patterns on foils, cutting these and applying them by hand on the final shirt (and this in a high-wage country like Germany!). Here I was astonished by a young and motivated workforce that did these labor intensive jobs in an apparently joyful way.

6. Digital printing is on its way. Fast. While custom digital printing on different fabrics in large scale has been discussed for ages, the technology finally made a great jump and seems to be ready for scalability.

7. Give it a personal touch. I really liked the idea that Spreadshirt's factory workers have been empowered to provide direct feedback to customers which created a shirt an employee really like. She then can put a "love mark", a small note, into the package expressing her appreciation for the design. To not inflate the love, however, the amount of love marks every employee gets is limited. Nice idea!

8. Bad IP legislation hurts. When moving through the factory and following the order taking process, it became obvious that one of the largest cost drivers is IP protection of designs and phrases. Huge boards in the factory showed examples of "no go" designs and words. It is amazing which simple and easy phrases and terms you can protect at the trademark office, allowing no-one else to use it. Another reason why the world should become more "creative commons".

This issue also addresses the fine line a mass customization company has to go when selling self-expression. When I want to express myself, I am not happy when I cannot use easy symbols like a red star (protected!) or any Olympia related stuff (very much verboten). In some blogs, Spreadshirt is called an "IP Nazi" for turning back too many designs. But with some lawyers making a nice business of ordering shirts with "forbidden" items and then sending a cost note and dissuasion, you better be careful and turn back your customers.

Managing this trade-offs is one of the specific trade-offs a mass customization company has to manage.

9. The market for mass customization still is a tiny niche, but growing rapidly. Confirming the research we recently finalized for our SERVIVE project (an EU funded project on mass customization or apparel), the Spreadshirters confirmed our assumption that customized products are still addressing a very small fraction of the market only. The core task today is to educate the market, not so much surprising it with ever new offerings. Most consumers just have never heard about the opportunity that there is something else then ready-made stuff on the shelves. Sounds strange to you when you are reading this blog and this lengthy posting until here, but these people exist. And they are the majority!

10. It is FUN to work for a mass customization T-Shirt company. Almost as much fun as working for a nice university. Young people, no ties or suits, plenty of room for exploration, and producing creative intellectual outcomes.

"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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The story behind Yerzies: An interview with Scott Killian.

Interview: Scott Killian, Co-Founder of Yerzies, DemandMade, and FanBuz

An interview with US mass customization veteran Scott Killian on what are his objectives with Yerzies (see previous posting) and what he sees next.

Scott Killian has been advising and operating successful e-commerce companies for 10 years — most notably as Chairman & CEO of FanBuzz, a leading e-commerce outsourcing and fulfillment company. Killian co-founded mass customization site FanBuzz in 1996. In 2000, Killian raised the first of two private equity rounds for the company totaling $10 million. Scott has been a long-time advocate for the use of mass customization to better understand consumer preferences, reduce inventory, improve assortment flexibility, and enhance the overall brand experience for consumer products. His insights have been featured in such national publications as USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and CBS Marketwatch.

Frank Piller: What is the idea behind your new venture, Yerzies?

Scott Killian: We began about three years ago with DemandMade, a software platform that helps manufacturers adapt their production processes to support units of one and online retailers to effectively communicate with these factories. As the network of manufacturers using our platform grew, a consumer-facing opportunity of our own began to emerge.

Retailers were taking advantage of the platform, but most of them lacked the expertise in product development they needed to really get the most out of the manufacturing options we made available to them. Yerzies effectively places the capabilities and the limitations of these factories into the hands of ordinary people. We've begun with apparel, but we will be adding more product categories soon.

Not only is Yerzies a platform for user-generated content, we're also entering into licensing relationships with a diverse group of brands that will allow us to offer a "long tail" assortment of designs and intellectual property from movies, television, lifestyle properties and consumer products companies. Customers will have the option to purchase or customize products bearing these trademarks.

Finally, we're also providing many of these same tools to other retailers and content properties who wish to offer products that are made on demand. For example, a major consumer brand is using DemandMade this holiday season to launch an entire apparel program which will be produced on demand in our factories.

FP: But your roots in mass customization are much older. You are a co- founder of FanBuzz, a large provider of customized sports apparel, started in 1996 as one of the first BtoC mass customization operations in the US. Later, you started DemandMade as a BtoB enabler of mass customization. How did you incorporate your experiences from FanBuzz and DemandMade into Yerzies?

SK: After we sold FanBuzz in 2002, I began providing advisory services to online retailers and consumer products companies, including several projects involving mass customization. DemandMade started in early 2005 and is now the parent company to Yerzies. All of these experiences required us to "get our hands dirty" along the entire length of the value chain and I think that was a tremendous advantage for us over somebody just getting into this business. We learned a great deal about licensing, how to connect the manufacturing processes with the end consumer, the danger of burdening users with too many choices, how to scale these programs, etc...

What's really interesting about Yerzies is that the entire business began with a three-year investment in the back office. When it came time for us to develop a consumer-facing application, we were able to do it on a strong foundation. Despite our interest in concepts and processes, we have strong roots in retail so we're really here to create merchandising programs that capture the hearts and minds of end consumers. This is always our first priority.

FP: What are future steps planned for Yerzies?

SK: We're just getting out of the gate right now so our immediate focus is on attracting an initial audience of users. In the coming months we'll be announcing some interesting twists to our business model which will help us draw an even larger mainstream audience, but we're satisfied for the moment to operate in beta mode while we whittle away bugs and garner feedback from early adopters. In the meantime, watch for a huge increase in the number of licensed properties. We've signed many that we haven't announced yet and we're currently in active discussions with many more. We'll also be expanding the array of embellishment options in Q1 of 2009. Despite the launch of Yerzies, DemandMade continues to support other retailers who are launching programs. We will be announcing several of these before the 2008/09 holiday season.

FP: More general, what are recent trends you see with regard to mass customization?

SK: If the first wave of innovation we saw online was about letting users create or configure a customized item, then the second wave is clearly about the intersection of social networking and mass customization. Although Etsy.com isn't a mass customizer, they have proven that users are not content to merely sell the items they've created, they want affirmation and interaction with other users. Since eBay has long dominated the online auction world, conventional wisdom would suggest that a start-up like Etsy would have no chance at success, but they provided a sense of community and a platform that respected the handmade items these folks were creating and that was perhaps more important to these users than the size of the audience.

If I've seen a trend, it's the recognition that these communities will be important to the long-term success Iof many mass customization programs. Ponoko and Red Bubble are two really interesting examples of this at work.

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

SK: In larger organizations, the development and execution of these programs often requires a diverse group of departments to coordinate their responsibilities. As you can imagine, getting folks from engineering, product development, legal, marketing, creative and operations to huddle around an entirely new concept they may not completely understand (or even believe in) is a major task. My advice to someone trying to develop a program like this within a major company is to make sure they have support at the highest level within the organization - they'll probably need it.

Regardless of the program size, unless the brand has some other strategic objective, most of these programs are still retail businesses at their core. As such, it should always start with the customer. I've been involved in the planning and execution of many mass customization programs, including some for major consumer products brands and I think it's very easy for management to project its own preferences or assumptions onto these projects without first identifying and understanding the customer. People create, modify and personalize products for many different reasons. Although it might be impossible to address all of them, I think it's critically important to understand what customers really want before investing in the idea.

Proper Cloth Online -- MIT Entrepreneur Launches Fashion 2.0 Startup

Today, one of the start-ups that will be presented in the "Mass Customization Next Generation" Track at the MIT Smart Customization Seminar opened it virtual doors. I am looking forward to see Seph's presentation on Nov 11 where he will share how his company will be different from the rest. While there are many companies selling shirts online, Proper Cloth has a number of innovative features that differentiates it from the crowd:

The main differentiator seems to be the really state-of-the art visualization and configuration toolkit, a job very well done! Look for the sliders and style advise!

Also, the idea of reverse engineering you favorite brand shirt (like, your BrooksBrothers favorite) and use these dimensions to get the size of your shirt seems to be a great idea. Have a look on the website to see more and experience the beauty of a well-done configurator.

Here is the press release of proper cloth with more information:

Proper Cloth, a clothing label offering high-end, customizable men's dress shirts, launched to the public this week. As a technology driven fashion company, Proper Cloth leverages the latest in web-application, 3D modeling and mass-customization supply chain technology to offer made to measure, personalized dress shirts for the same price as mass produced dress shirts sold in retail stores.

Founder Seph Skerritt, an electrical engineer and recent graduate from MIT, is a strong advocate of applying technology to unexpected problems, in this case, the problem that most men can't find dress clothes they like. According to Seph, "For men frustrated with boring dress shirt styles or off the rack sizes that never fit right, Proper Cloth provides a lot of value. Men can finally get the shirt style they want in a size that fits exactly as it should. Shopping has never been more convenient."

With Proper Cloth's online design tool, customers first select a fabric they like, choosing from a wide variety of colors in solids, stripes and other patterns. They then choose a collar, cuff and pocket style. To personalize the garment, customers can select a unique fabric for the inside of the shirt's collar band or the inside of the shirts cuffs, or add a monogram. Expert style advice guides less fashion-savvy shoppers. Customers can specify their shirt's size by selecting another shirt's size they like and making modifications or by submitting their body measurements and letting Proper Cloth compute their personal size. Customers can even directly specify garment dimensions if they choose.  Proper Cloth shirts are delivered to customers 1-4 weeks from the date of purchase with prices start around $90.

Based in New York, Proper Cloth is part technology startup and part fashion company. Propercloth.com utilizes the latest web application technology to deliver an intuitive, enjoyable user experience. Proprietary 3D modeling software digitally renders a preview of the garment as it is designed. Proper Cloth uses proprietary fit algorithms to calculate shirt patterns from a variety of inputs. Fabric pieces are computer precision cut and hand sewn for an exact, consistent fit. All shirts are produced in the United States using premium fabrics sourced from Italy.

For more information, see http://propercloth.com --- or join the participant list of the MIT Smart Customization Seminar and discuss with Seph Skerritt in person.

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.

Archetype Solutions Launches Indi. New Custom Apparel Company Supplements their BtoB and Consumer Offerings

Indi is the newest spin-off of Archetype Solutions, a company known to many insiders in the field of customized apparel as a premier enabler of mass customization for large fashion brands. Archetype Solutions has spent years studying human bodies and fit to develop an innovative technology that enables the company to determine an individual’s body shape and create a unique pattern to fit their shape. Previously, they used this capability in a BtoB environment to enable fashion brands to create an own mass customization offering.

 In a first business-to-consumer venture, Zafu.com, Archetype then utilized their knowledge to provide an innovative matching service for jeans (see my earlier posting on Zafu, one of the most innovative companies in the customization & personalization domain).

Now they went one step further by founding a custom apparel company, indi, based in Emeryville, California, just across the Bay from San Francisco.

indi enables customers to create apparel which reflects their individual style and preferences. In the moment, indi markets and sells its custom apparel under two brands addressing two of the most common customized products in the apparel segment: indiDenim provides custom jeans for women and men, and indiTailored custom dress shirts for men. All apparel is made using Archteype's proprietary fit technology. Both customization offers went live during the last week.

Configurator and co-design process

Both the jeans and the shirt offering are based on a good, state-of-the art configurator. However, nothing new and noteworthy here, both toolkits are designed to make their job simple and with less complexity for the consumer. What differentiates the two offerings from their competition is the scope of customization offerings, and, hopefully, the better fit due to Archetype's long experience in the field.

Shirts begin at an affordable $79, custom jeans are starting at $130, so the price point of mass customization is truly met. What I liked is the strong focus on customer satisfaction: indi guarantees each and every order. Customers not completely satisfied can return garments for a full refund.

Denims are produced in a dedicated high-tech factory in Mexico, and shirts in Honduras.

Closing the learning cycle of mass customization

The company also offers an innovative reorder option that allows a customer of shirt to refine the fit of their garment by making adjustments to the neck, sleeve, arm, cuff and body length. These adjustments are used to alter the customer’s unique pattern which indiTailored keeps on file, so the customer can always find a new customized fit in more fabrics and styles (the selection of fabrics for the shirts is very limited in the moment):

 "One thing that is quite innovative about our technology is the ability for a customer to make fit adjustments to a garment that they have received.", CEO Marybeth Luber explains. "We recognize that fit is a very personal thing and sometimes we do not nail it on the first attempt.  Our “re-order” process allows a customer to tweak the fit of their pattern – say take the waist in an inch or lengthen the inseam.

 We, then, make the garment and store that pattern on the customer’s file for future orders.  With indi Wholesale, we are looking to partner with boutiques to carry standard size indi garments while also offering the custom ordering process.  So many people try things on and wish they could change one or two things about the garment.  This model enables this. "

 This is an old, but very powerful idea of mass customization finally in place!

 indi CEO Marybeth Luber on what's coming next

 I met indi CEO Marybeth Luber on the MCPC 2007 conference where she already mentioned the start-up. She is a former banker turned apparel executive, and joined Archetype Solutions in 2004 and took the helm in 2007. She has since been steering the company toward its vision of introducing a portfolio of brands leveraging the company’s custom technology.

 In an e-mail conversation, I asked her what's next to expect from Archetype and indi. She told me that the company intends to expand the portfolio of products available for customers. Next for indiTailored will be a fashion style with more contemporary fabrics and expanded customization options. And there will be even more, as Marybeth explains.

 "Next up for us is a low rise jean for men to add to the men’s Potrero Classic and Relaxed fits we currently offer.  We have design-your-own denim jackets in the works for women where women will get to choose details such as pockets, finishing, embroidery and screen-printing. Additionally, we absolutely need to expand our size range to cover Plus and Big&Tall.  This is important to us, because we want to offer garments for all consumers.  These sizes require different fit blocks so it is also in the pipeline of future product rollout."

One further idea will be a wholesale business for indi that the company considers to be quite compelling for bringing mass customization for apparel to retail (http://www.indidenim.com/wholesale/).

The wholesale program enables a retail partner to choose the fabrics, styles and sizes that are best suited for their store's clientele. And if customers still can't find what they're looking for, retailers can place custom orders for them. What I found very innovative is the option for retailers to create their own designs, choosing from the hundreds of custom style options. This utilizes the customization options of indi even further, offering retailers the opportunity to create their own assortment.

 Marybeth Luber: "Of course, our B2B business [with Archtetype] continues to be very important to us.  We have positioned indi in a slightly more premium space and offer an expanded selection of styles and options with higher price points so we are not in direct competition with our B2B business.  Many consumers still do not know the option for affordable custom clothing exists so we think anything we do to further develop this market is good for all of us.  We also hope to pursue the B2B model with indi by partnering with 3rd party distribution channels.  We currently have one such partnership in the works."

 I also asked here how indi relates to Zafu. Are there any connections internally between Zafu und indiDenim?

 "We spun off the zafu business last year," Marybeth Luber told me, "and the two companies now run autonomously.  We do, however, have indi jeans featured on zafu, and indi is definitely a good option for zafu users when zafu is unable to recommend many brands that are available in the marketplace."

 Cooperation between indiDemin and Intellifit  

indiDenim also will cooperate with Intellifit to gather body measurements in a high-tech store environment. Tests are in its way in the moment.

Intellifit currently markets a patented 3D full body scanner that accurately takes over 200 body measurements of a fully clothed person in under 15 seconds (see my earlier posting). At a Custom Jeans Center, the customer enters a see-through Intellifit Virtual Fitting Room measuring 8 feet high and 7 feet wide.  Low-power radio waves collect numerous, accurate body measurements of the customer over a period of 20 seconds. Customers don't have to undress for this technology.

The customer then designs their pair of jeans online at the indiDenim site, choosing from a selection of styles and washes, and specifying details such as pocket shape and design, stitching and personalization options. 

 The two initial centers are located at each company’s respective locations, just outside of Philadelphia and San Francisco.  Using Intellifit’s and indi’s technologies, the centers enable consumers to design their own custom-made jeans in-person with a guarantee of a precise fit.

The marketplace

In a study by consumer research group Mintel, quoted in a press release by archetype, the overwhelming demand for custom jeans is confirmed. The 2007 jeans market reached $16.7 billion, a 5.4% growth over the previous year. Prior to that, in 2006, the jeans market experienced a 7.9% growth. This wardrobe staple is often the most challenging clothing item to find, and fit remains the primary concern for jeans buyers. In the Mintel study, more than half of respondents (56%) reported “it is very difficult to find a pair that fits properly,” while a third of jeans buyers (33%) said that “sizes vary too much.”

indiDenim’s customization eliminates the fit issue, as each jean is custom tailored to each customer’s size and shape. indiDenim’s innovative technology enables size and style combinations that would otherwise require millions of SKUs and be impossible for a traditional retailer to offer, Marybeth explains. "Our ability to customize the fit while offering extensive style variations such as fabric, rise and leg style cannot be replicated by a traditional retailer given constraints on inventory that typically limit the style and size selection.  Previously, consumers could spend days shopping for their perfect pair of jeans, which they can now create in minutes at a Custom Jeans Center."  Or today on the internet.

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

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

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

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

On Threadless' Size and Development

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Threadless' Corporate Culture and Work Style

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

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

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

On other product categories Threadless is exploring

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spreadshirt Reveals New Crowdsourced Logo

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

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

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

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

Update: Fashion Crowdsourcing Project Nvohk Set to Launch on June 5, 2008

Some weeks ago, I reported about nvohk (pronounced ‘invoke’), a company that puts our "collective customer commitment" model into action: Get 5000 members who pay 50$ each of funding, use the money to create an eco-friendly line of clothes, and then sell the clothes to a wider public and share the profits with the original members. Members, as part of their pre-payment, get the right to vote on new designs and co-manage some of nvohk's business decisions.

In a press release today, the company reported that since December 4, 2007, nvohk could recruit 2,800 members worldwide – enough that the company will officially activate membership and launch its brand on June 5, 2008.

I am curious to see how the project will develop and if it reaches its threshold of 5000 members. It seems a bit more difficult then the founders officially expected. In January they were talking about 20,000 people to be recruited. to start the project. Now they are down to 5000, and still 40% away from this target.

Perhaps the founders should just position nvohk in the "pimp my C.V." domain. For just 50$ investment, you honestly can say you run your own eco-business and are investing in the sustainability revolution ...

Context:
- Website: www.projectnvohk.com
- My previous posting about the company

Mass Customization in Clothing & Fashion: Annual Conference of the European Technology Platform

Thursday May 29th 2008, 9.30 – 14.30 in Brussels, Belgium.
Pre-Conference on May 28th, 9.20 - 17.00 h

EURATEX, the European Association of the Textile Industries, is running its third conference on mass customization in the textile and clothing industry. It is the main European networking meeting for this sector and presents an excellent opportunity to connect with industry, technology providers, and EU policy makers.

More than 200 participants from industry, academia, public authorities and the media attended last year’s Technology Platform conference and the organizers expect at least a similar attendance this year.

A range of industry speakers are scheduled to describe their own experiences and business cases in the field of Mass Customization. The European Commission will present its policies and programs to support more Research & Innovation in the industrial sector in general and the textile and clothing sector in particular.

This event will be preceded on May 28th by a full-day pre-conference which provides an overview of recent mass customization related projects funded by the EU.

For the full program and more information, please download this PDF.

Attendance of the conference including lunch and cocktail is free of charge. Registrations are handled on a first come, first served basis.

A registration form is here, and more information on accommodation in the conference hotel can be found here.

Contact for organizational & logistical questions
Paulette De Wilde, Euratex (Ph : +32-2-285.48.83, [email protected])

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

Crowd F(o)unding an Eco-Clothing Label: nvohk explores the collective customer commitment method to create a new fashion line

In a press release today, nvohk (pronounced ‘invoke’) announced that it has signed up over 1,250 future members for its crowdsourcing-based business model. Its founders, Brendan T. Lynch and Sergio Salas, claim that it is the "first community-managed, eco-friendly, surf-inspired clothing company."

Their idea places our "collective customer commitment" model into action: Get 5000 members who pay 50$ each of funding, use the money to create an eco-friendly line of clothes, and then sell the clothes to a wider public and share the profits with the original members. Members, as part of their pre-payment, get the right to vote on new designs and co-manage some of nvohk's business decisions. Members, for example, can decide about the logo design, web design, product design, advertising, etc. In addition, nvohk will donate 10% of net profits to environmental organizations selected by its members. In the mid-term, the company wants to recruit up to 40,000 members.

The idea has some appeal. It indeed "fills a gap in the lifestyle brand arena," as the press release says. Nvohk enables consumers to get involved and participate in business decision-making and environmental causes. It also provides consumers with an entertaining platform for making a perceived positive impact on the environment.

But it also is a clever business model building on customer integration. For the 50$, customers will get a special t-shirt and 25% off all nvohk products. They also get kind of a dividend: 35% of nvohk’s net profits will be transferred into reward points that can be redeemed by members to purchase products. This all sounds like a slef-sustaining business cycle.

If you want to invest 50$ as well, go here: www.projectnvohk.com.

Virtual Fashion Technology: New blog covers major pesonalization technology

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

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

Here is a selection of her recent posts:

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

# A Conversation with Louise Guay from My Virtual Model

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

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

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

IMB Forum: Open Innovation in the Textile Industries (Cologne, 21 Nov 2007)

IMB is one of the largest trade shows for the textile industry, a showcase not of the latest fashions in apparel but the latest in machinery and software for the industry. The IMB main event takes place in Cologne every three years. IMB Forum is a smaller sister event of IMB, filling the years in between with a focused exhibition and conference.

The fifth event of the series will be held on the Cologne Fair Ground on Wednesday, 21st November and Thursday, 22nd November 2007. This year's conference theme is "Information Technology for the Textile Processing and Apparel Industry", and I have the honor to provide the opening keynote for this event as part of a conference section dealing with open innovation in this sector.

I am speaking together with Ralf Reichwald, my colleague and co-author from TU Munich. Our topic on the morning of Nov 21 is "Open Innovation: Customers as active partners of companies in the textile industry." We will address latest trends and case studies on open innovation with a focus on the textile industries to provide an overall framework of interactive value creation.

Our talk is followed by Andreas Milles from Spreadshirt, who is presenting the leading implementation of open innovation and interactive value creation in Europe. Johann Füller from Hyve, Munich will present the work his company did with BMW to implement open innovation in this company

For the entire program, head to the IMB forum website, here is a PDF flyer for download.

Here is some more information from a IMB press release:

"IMB Forum, the international exhibition with an accompanying congress, which will take place at the Cologne exhibition center from November 21 to 22, 2007, has come to be one of the sector's top annual events. That's why many leading companies regard participation in the IMB Forum as an absolute must. Or, as Holger Klappstein, Managing Director Sales and Marketing of TXTe solutions GmbH in Halle, puts it: "The IMB Forum is one of the most important information platforms for the fashion, garment, footwear, and textile industries."

The success of the IMB Forum is based on the fact that the event perfectly supports direct dialogue between the sector's users and suppliers. This is also an important factor for Dominik Berger, Managing Director of RF-IT Solutions GmbH in Graz: "The IMB Forum offers us an ideal presentation platform for our goods and services in this area, while simultaneously offering us the opportunity to conduct intensive discussions with our customers."

Christiane Klaschik, Head of Marketing for ImPuls AG from Krefeld, is also well aware of this strength of the IMB Forum: "There's hardly any other trade fair where we can meet such a concentration of our target groups. Customer contact is also a very important issue for us."

Jacqueline Kellner, Head of Marketing at Lectra Deutschland GmbH, regards the IMB Forum as "one of the most professional events for presenting yourself to a high-caliber public."

"We believe in the event and clearly recognize the efforts on the part of Koelnmesse to achieve a breakthrough in terms of the degree of international participation, especially with regard to the visitors. The presence of the decision-makers, at least from the immediately neighboring countries, is a crucial step in the right direction," says Yvonne Heinen-Foudeh, Marketing and Communications Manager Europe of Gerber Technology GmbH in Munich."

The IMB Forum 2007 will take place from Wednesday, November 21 to Thursday, November 22, 2007. The exhibition will be open to visitors on the first day from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and on the second day from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Presentations will be held in the morning and afternoon on both days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview: Uche Okonkwo on the Mass Customization Trend in the Luxury Industry

Uche C. Okonkwo is the Executive Director & Co-founder of Luxe, E.t.c., a Paris based Strategy & Management Consultancy specialized in the luxury industry. She also will be a presenter at the MCPC 2007 conference at MIT in Boston (Oct 7-9, 2007). In her new book, Luxury Fashion Branding, she also discusses the growing mass customization trend in the luxury industry.

Uche is one of the pioneer strategy and management consultants in the luxury industry and a key player in the current re-shaping of the industry. Her company, Luxe E.t.c. advises luxury companies such as Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Gucci, Piaget, André Ross, Daniele de Winter among several others.

A regular conference speaker, Uche is also the Editor of the luxury business magazine, Luxe-Mag.Com targeted at both the luxury business and academic communities. She has an MBA from Brunel Buisness School, London and is a guest lecturer and doctorate candidate at Ecole Superieur de Commerce, Rennes.

Her new book, Luxury Fashion Branding>, addresses the business of luxury fashion from a strategic viewpoint through tracing the origins of luxury fashion, assessing its consumer behaviour, retailing tactics, branding and marketing strategies, ebusiness, business modeling, the new luxury, customization strategies and best and worst practices. The chapter on mass customization in this book attracted me to contact her and ask her about the growing mass customization trend in the luxury industry.

Ms. Okonkwo, what trends support the growth of mass customization in the luxury industry?

The major factor driving this trend is simply the changing needs of luxury consumers. Luxury consumers worldwide have evolved in recent decades and in most luxury key markets, the consumer has become highly informed and savvy about marketing techniques (and possibilities), making them appear more intelligent. And we all know that when people become more intelligent, they naturally become more demanding of choices, options and their levels of influence. In this industry, consumers want personal recognition through a more intimate relationship with the brands. One of the most efficient ways of addressing this need is through mass customization, which provides the possibility of participation in the product creation process.

Which are some recent examples of mass customization in the luxury industry that you find most appealing?

As indicated in my book, luxury brands have been reluctant to adopt mass customization as a core aspect of their marketing/ retail strategies since it has been widely believed that mass customization robs the brands of the ‘exclusive’ and ‘distance’ factors that luxury requires to thrive. Luxury brands are however beginning to understand the multiple possibilities of customization and how these can be applied without over-exposing their brands. As a result of this scenario, there remain few examples that can be used as benchmarks. A notable one is British accessories brand, Anya Hindmarch, which allows clients to personalize their leather goods on its website. Louis Vuitton has also provided the possibility of customizing its charm bracelets on its website, in the past.

How are these developments different to the traditional bespoke or tailor-made products which often are synonymously with luxury goods?

The main feature of the current mass customization techniques for luxury companies is technology, particularly the Internet. Luxury brands have multiple possibilities to customize products, services and experiences using the Internet and their e-Databases. There is also the advanced development of customizing the customer experience through mobile applications featuring brand-specific customized content, as powered by Interactive Luxury Solutions (www.interactiveluxurysolutions.com)

Do you think that mass customization will “downgrade” the image of luxury goods if now everyone can afford a custom-made bag or custom-made shoes? How will the democratization of the bespoke tailor affect the luxury industry?

Customization in itself does not downgrade luxury goods if the other aspects of the marketing mix remain constant. There are multiple tactics that can be applied to luxury product customization that do not dilute the luxury characteristics but actually enhance the brand equity. For example, if the price of customized luxury goods remain premium and the provision of customization possibilities is time-controlled or related to special products, events or client groups, then customization will actually become an aspirational aspect of luxury retailing.

What about mass customization of services? Luxury is very much about being pampered and supported. Will mass customization also change luxury services?

Customizing luxury services is actually one of the means of enhancing intimate relations with clients and extending the pampering element. If a client walks into the Louis Vuitton store on Avenue Montaigne in Paris, and is immediately recognized, not just physically but also their product preferences, sizes and how they prefer to shop, that would be exceptional customer service. In the same way, if a client visits the Palazzo Versace in Australia and every aspect of their stay is customized according to their preferences, it will definitely enhance their brand affiliation towards Versace.

What are the main challenges in mass customization for the luxury industry still ahead?

The major challenge lies in changing the orientation and thinking of luxury companies. The majority of luxury brands have a pessimistic view of mass customization. Luxury brands need to recognize customization as a core aspect of their corporate strategies and a booster of brand equity.

What would be your main advice for a manager or a top brand in the luxury industry who wants to implement mass customization?

I would tell them to apply customization but at same time remain true to their brand identity and the core attributes that set them apart as luxury brands. This is the way to assure the feasibility of customization in the luxury arena.

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?

This is a tricky one! Personally I will be thrilled the day I will walk into a luxury fashion store and receive product suggestions based on my shopping history and pre-registered preferences, both online and offline. The luxury industry is decades away from other sectors in adopting advanced customization techniques but I’d like to think that I’m wrong.

Contact Ms. Uche C. Okonkwo at author [at] luxuryfashionbranding.com

Threadless in Numbers

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

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

2000: Year of founding Threadless.

125: Number of submissions received by Threadless each day.

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

Hundreds of thousands: Number of user voting each day.

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

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

2,000: Dollars paid to winning designers.

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

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

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

2.0: Lowest rank of a winning design.

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

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

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

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

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

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

IHT Reviews Bodymetrics’ Mass Customization Program at Harrods and Selfridges in London

Robb Young recently published a nice review of mass customization enabler Bodymetrics, London, in the International Herald Tribune. I visited this shop-in-shop several times and was appealed by its great design, but also noticed that store traffic seams to be slow. But as the IHT article tells, Bodymetrics is becoming a success story.

Bodymetrics uses a 3D Scanner to start the selling process with a 3D body of a customers. "Body shapes vary infinitely," Suran Goonatilake, Bodymetric's founder, is quoted in the article. "Classic measurements are merely body landmarks. One of the most crucial parts of getting any garment to fit right is shaping, how your body is curved. You can have two people with identical jeans measurements but the end result is a completely different fit."

Goonatilake started his mass customization venture from a project for the Centre for Fashion Enterprise, a business development program based at the London College of Fashion. The first Bodymetrics boutique opened in Selfridges in 2004, targeting a largely female clientele with private-label jeans and licenses with other denim brands. In 2006, a second boutique opened in Harrods, expanding the service to include women's tailoring for brands like Vivienne Westwood and Nick Holland.

This approach of using combining mass customization capabilities with existing brands and design seems to be very promising. Bodymetrics an enabler or intermediary, but does not have to build its own brand or designs.

Compared to most other mass customizers in the fashion world, Bodymetrics is focusing on a female clientele, Goonatilake says in the article. "At the moment, men's sales are still small but when we officially launch our men's range this spring, we're aiming for around 10 percent and the ultimate target is something around 25 percent" of the company's overall business.

Clothes are made in the Far East or North America in special factories that manufacture garments one by one and can do finishings by hand. Sales are good, despite high prices start around £250, or $482, per pair of jeans "We carry no stock, we're never on sale and we get the cash up front before manufacture," Goonatilake is quoted "That's why we have such very high sales per square foot — about $2,000 — and that's everything in retailing."

The article announces a competing version of Archetype’s Zafu service : Bodymetrics plans to scan a partner brand's merchandise in a variety of sizes and then can match an item to a customer's scan to identify any fit problems. Such a system would allow better fitting garments without expensive one-of-a-kind production.

Other then these details, the article reveals no new details. But it is another sign that even rather basic mass customization offerings are still an appealing topic for many papers – more than 15 years after Levi Strauss introduced its Personal Pair. And the journalist was very pleased with the fit of his trial jeans.

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,

Trend: Ultra-Cheap Custom Clothing – How Ziami uses multi level marketing schemes to sell custom goods (UPDATE)

(This is an updated version of the original post.)

I always have argued that mass customization has large potentials for huge cost savings along the entire supply chain. Established companies like Dolzer in Germany have shown since 25 years that custom made clothing can have the same price tag as conventional standard apparel (in the 200-300 Euro range for a custom suit, 50-70 Euro for a custom shirt). Most mass customization clothing offerings, however, come in a price range of 800-1000 Euro (far beyond the price of bespoke tailoring, but with a premium to your average Boss suit).

But as everywhere in retail, there seems to be also a trend of discountization in mass customization: New players like Ziami or Aston offer CUSTOM made shirts for 29 Euro, and a custom suit for 99 Euro. Especially Düsseldorf, Germany based Ziami seems to enter the market aggressively with its range of custom apparel items. Manufacturing is done in China and Thailand, measurements are taken by sales associates by hand, fabrics are cheap and limited, but the customization options quite large. Ziami's approach is based on a multi-level marketing (or: pyramid) approach. This means, all products are sold by independent sales associates who purchase a 50 Euro starter package that enables them to become a custom shirt seller. This package includes everything to sell Ziami shirts, like a "How to measure"-DVD, one sample shirt, fabric samples, measuring tape, needles, 50 ordering flyers, 50 promotion flyers, a brochure containing all the necessary information and the official license to sell Ziami clothes. Distribution partners purchase a custom shirt for 22 Euro, and resell it for the suggested 29 Euro. In addition, they are motivated to recruit further sales associates, as they will participate also on the margins generated by those 2nd tier partners.

One of the more active Ziami partners, Stangl in Vienna, Austria, has described this system very neatly in an English presentation on their web site. And another motivated promoter of the company has even created a nice YouTube Video that describes the system and provides some insight in the rather easy measurement process.

Can you make a custom shirt for 29 Euro? Yes, of course, given that consumers are willing to wait (as for this price, you cannot use single item air-fright from Asia to Europe) and compromise for the quality of the fabric. Reviews and feedbacks by customers on the internet are mixed. Some really love the system, others are rather annoyed and complain about unstable quality, bad customer service and poor fabrics (just Google Ziami and you find numerous forums and newsgroups discussing Ziami's shirts).

According to their own claim, Ziami, founded in 2003 by Designer Ersin Canga and Philip Kamp, have risen to become Europe's #1 Producer of Custom Tailored Shirting (however I could get no proof for this, interview requests with the founders were not answered). Ziami most recently expanded its offerings to include Custom Designer Jeans and Cashmere Sweaters available for $29.95 each. Also belts and other accessories are offered in "custom designs". But what really astonished me was the price for their custom shoes which will be offered soon: "The shoe is made from the highest quality leathers to your exact foot measurements for just $79.95 ($600 retail value)". From everything I know from footwear customization, this price is not possible, neither with manufacturing in China or elsewhere, given that this is a real custom shoe.

Is this good or bad mass customization? Well, I am not quite sure. I think the danger of such a system is that it cannibalizes the efforts of higher-quality vendors of mass customized apparel. It also is a low-tech version that depends strongly on the personal skills of each sales associate (this I reagrd as the largest challenge of this model). It may also discourage customers to try more custom goods once they purchased a Ziami shirt, waited for 4-8 weeks to get it delivered, and then were disappointed by the cut and quality.

On the other hand, this system shows what you can do if you really rethink the value chain in the apparel industry. Extreme cases, as this ultra-discount mass customization offering, are always great examples to study and to test the boundaries of a system. As such a case, I really appreciate this experiment and will observe curiously where this will lead us.

Update:
Just by chance I had the opportunity to order a custom shit from Ziami recently. I will report here how this works out and how it fits. And I learned that the 29 Euro retail price for the custom shirt is just marketing: You always have to pay a 5 Euro handling & shipping fee per shirt, also if you order several at one time. And then there is a 10 Euro "measuring" fee for you firs shirt. So in total, you pay 44 Euro -- which sounds not as spectacular as the 29 Euros before (and there are many players in this price range -- with local manufacturing and professional tailors taking your measurements -- and MUCH faster delivery).

Also, Ziami's headquarters seem to make most profit not from selling the custom products but from selling marketing materials, order forms, web hosting, etc. to their resellers. These standard items are much more expensive than the shirts (in comparison).

The distributor selling me the shirt told me that the start phase for custom suits (99 Euros plus hidden costs), custom jeans (29) and shoes (79) has just started -- meaning that in the moment only the independent distributors can order.

UPDATE TWO: Eight weeks later, the shirt was delivered. As I ordered it in Europe and was in the US when it came, I only today (Feb 2007) can evaluate the fit: To make it short, this shirt does NOT fit. The arms are at least an inch too short, and the shoulder area too tight on the bottom and too long on the top. The quality of the fabric, the finishing of the shirt, the buttons etc. are, however, good. It also came in a nice package, and I liked the feature that I got an extra piece of the fabric for my pocket.

This experience reveals one of the largest challenges of mass customization: get the configuration process correctly. Ziami relies on independent sales agents, and the quality of your products will depend on their personal skills. I always preach that the basic principle of mass customization is process stability, and this is what Ziami lacks totally in the order taking process.

In my case, the sales agent was a very nice, but apparently "fresh in the business" management student from Vienna who probably lacked the correct skills to get the measurements correctly. Established, vertical integrated mass customization providers often report from the difficulty to get qualified sales persons with adequate skills for the measurement job (or they just invest in 3D scanners to avoid this problem), and so I do not not see how an independent part-time Ziami reseller shall learn this without much "trial-and-error" learning using his or her first customers.

Also, prices are calculated in a way that for 99% of all Ziami agents this business will only be a small side business. With about 35% margin (based on very cheap goods) and a personal sales process, you can not become rich or make this your full business -- and thus only few Ziami agents will develop strong learning effects to get an expert in the order taking.

So my conclusion: This is an interesting concept, prices are very good. The product I got was nice, but did not fit. The main problem: The Ziami system lacks the most important aspect of a mass customization business: stability in the configuration process (and I do not see how you can add this with their pricing model in a multi-level marketing scheme). Thus, if you order, do so only with an experienced agent, probably someone who is from the clothing business and not just your next-door neighbor.

Custom Fashion 2.0: How a new Korean project wants to lift mass customization in the apparel business to a new level

On Monday this week, the i-Fashion project was launched in Seoul, Korea. I was invited to speak at the opening event of this interesting initiative. Its objective is to create an entire infrastructure for mass customization in the fashion industry by integrating a number of technologies which today have not been applied in larger scale. Sponsored by the Korean Ministry of Commerce & Energy with about US $7 mil., it combines a consortium of 9 apparel companies and a few technology providers.

As you would expect from a high-tech country like Korea, the exhibition on the opening even was dominated by numerous huge flat panel screens. These screens were, however, no sheer illustration but actual part of a totally new selling process. The entire process builds on virtual models which are generated by a 3D body scan of a consumer. The customer can then create on a touch-screen kiosk her new apparel, including the design of the fabric. Designs are illustrated real-time on the customer's avatar. This avatar and virtual garments shall be also used in mobile applications (where South Korea is famous for) and traditional online shopping environments. Also this idea is not new, but has – to my knowledge – never been integrated in a real shopping infrastructure. One of the project partners, the Hyundai conglomerate, will open a test store in its department store chain already this year.

A co-speaker on an international seminar for this project was Prof. Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, a leading expert in virtual modeling and the Director of University of Geneva's MIRALab. I had heard of this lab before, but was astonished to see the scope of its activities. Prof. Magnenat-Thalmann reported from her work as part of the LEAPFROG project, an European project with the objective to modernize and ultimately transform the European clothing sector into a flexible knowledge-driven high-tech industry. Drivers of the project are a radical move towards rapid customized manufacturing through flexiblization and integration of cost-effective and sustainable processes from fabric processing to customer delivery and a new focus on customer service. MIRALab contributed to this project with the development of a 3D virtual try-on platform, including real-time body sizing and cloth simulation.

Projects like i-Fashion and LEAPFROG are very important for the realization of mass customization in the clothing industry as they go beyond automatic pattern generation (based on 3D scans) or flexible manufacturing technologies, but try to create an integrated platform where most of the traditional physical design, manufacturing, and sales processes are shifted to the digital domain.

One of the interesting parts of the project i-Fashion project in this regards is the large scale application of digital-printing for high-end fashion items. This enables the efficient productions of individual patterns and may solve the problem of huge inventories which are required for customization on the component level. i-Fashion Project partner Yuhan-Kimberley demonstrated their latest existing technology during the opening event. I was surprised by the quality of the printing process, but also its speed and cost efficiency (comparable to normal paper photo printing). Also, the garments do not need any further processing or finishing after the printing process. This technology, which shall be improved even further in the project, but first of all integrated in a complete business model, could allow also the legions of custom t-shirt printer a more sustainable production technology compared to today's heat transfer process.

More project info in case you speak Korean: http://textile.konkuk.ac.kr/englishhome/index.html

Or contact the project;s director, Prof. Chang Kyu PARK from the Department of Textile Engineering at Konkuk University, Seoul ([email protected]).

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

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

Here are some interesting quotes from this article:

The Art-Gallery Model.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The limits of the Threadless model.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See here for authors and abstracts of all cases.

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

Related posts on this topic:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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