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Among the many options within Dell’s order process, I could choose de design on the back of the laptop. My choice, though, was limited to a range of propositions, going from a full purple colour version to an arty futuristic composition. And what about a drawing of mine ? Or a picture of my childrens ? The view from my appartment, during the last vacation ? No clue…

Would Dell be in a mindset of Mass Customization, this feature would have been available on the website, may we think.

What about design mass customization ?

All right. Perhaps plastic printing technologies is not that developped yet. So far, any electonic device manufacturer isn’t abble to deliver a washing machine in the exact olive green colour I wish to fit with my walls. Though, several online companies live now on the model “the customer is the designer”. Not the least are textile producers like Threadless, Lafraise or Spreadshirt. He/she can bring his/her own symbol, drawing, tattoo, message (as far as not copyrighted) and make it printed on the clothes. Cafe Press users, another example, sold goods for 100 millions $ of self customized T-shirt.

Mass customization is taking ground. Examples flourish, where one can custom its own wine, its music instrument or a piece of furniture.

Frank Piller, a researcher from the RWTH Aachen University in Germany, is confident that mass customization is heading to a bright future. Even if we are still in early days :

“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!”

Personaly, I look forward to see car manufacturers letting their customer order and choose online the colour and the flavour of their new vehicle’s outfit….

Crowdsourcing and supply chain

The toy producer Lego is not doing something else, by the way, with his succesful Lego Mindstorm platform, where fans can design their own robot, machine, truck, etc.

But the Danish company adds something on top of that. The best designed products will be put into production and broadly marketed, with a royalty fee given back to the original designer. There, mass customization meets crowdsourcing and the boundaries between client and vendor are shrinking.

Should mass customization  take off, the impact for the supply chain management, transportation, logistics, will be substantial. Or maybe not. After all, we already live in a time-to-market economy, as Dell, Nike or Levi-Straus show. With mass customization, the challenge will be to open the array of choice, not restrict it to a preselected list of features,  in order to allow a real personnalisation of the items. That is a new way to innovate.