People interested in Mass Customization tend to have utopian visions of factories on desktops that can print household products with the click of a mouse. Hopefully this vision will come to fruition and we will all have affordable 3D printers on our dinner tables soon. In the mean time, custom manufacturing technology like 3D printers and laser cutters are creating a new kind of entrepreneur. The product designer hobbyist.
A friend of mine has recently commercialized a project called the Lime Tree Cove BarMaid. It’s a device that puts the perfect amount of salt or spice on your mixed drink of choice. It looks like something you might see at Crate & Barrel or give as a wedding gift and it was designed and commercialized on nights and weekends.
It’s an exaggeration to call a project like this a hobby, but it is still less than a full time job. I think we are still a decade a way from people producing novel products at home, but right on the cusp of semipro product design. Small groups or individuals can create products that look and work as well as those released by consumer product companies for the same dollar and time commitment as restoring an old car.
Ultimately I think we will see a landscape much like we have in journalism. Time, Newsweek, and the Economist are still the publications of record, but ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch have built nice businesses filling a large niche market. I think OXO will still dominate the cooking tool market, but companies like Lime Tree Cove will be able to address smaller, but still lucrative, opportunities.
This slide show illustrates the process from sketch to manufactured article. It leaves out some key phases including using a 3D printer to validate the mechanical design, but it shows that you don’t need a sophisticated R&D program to commercialize a product.
