TL:DR Crafting is a $30B industry and could be an instructive model for companies pursuing mass customization or personal fabrication business models. Companies should focus on their customer’s sense of curiosity, creativity, and other emotions that drive crafting behavior not just the enabling technology.
Every year over $3B gets spent on social networking activities. Not Facebook ads, or Twitter promotions, but glitter, paper, and some cool tech based tools used in scrapbooking. Groups of friends, usually women, get together to craft making scrapbooks, jewelry, soap, and other items. They chat and craft and power many businesses simultaneously. This is one of many social dynamics illustrated in research done by the Craft & Hobby Association, the trade organization for the handicraft industry.
I found an interesting market report from the CHA c.2006 on SlideShare. Some of the financial data is out of date, but there are a couple very interesting slides about the motivations of crafters. The data is very interesting because it sheds light on the weird discrepancy that over $30B is spent per year on crafting materials and media, but there have been no consumer facing mass customization companies that can even get to a modest level of success.
A slide from that presentation begin to explain why:
Ways to Improve Mass Customization Services
Ego: Make people “feel” creative, even if constrained – Participants cited innate creativity as one of their main motivations for crafting. This is an area where customization companies don’t spend nearly enough energy. Of all the mass customization companies that use the “Configurator” approach only Freitag’s F-Cut system could truly be called creative. If you aren’t familiar F-Cut lets you design a bag by selecting the material used for each panel. The neat bit is that the material is tarps from the side of trucks and once a part of the tarp is gone it can’t be reused, so the customer must get creative about which parts to choose to make a nice design. It is really fun, a rarity in this kind of product site.
The rest have all the creative appeal of web forms you have to fill out when you try to get a credit report. Nike designed a slick looking UI for their shoe customization, but you are still just “checking” boxes.
Curiosity: The experience is as important as the object – People like learning and crafting provides a way for regular people to experiment, stretch their boundaries, and have a nice bauble at the end. The tricky balance for designers of custom products is that they can’t offer too much variation otherwise the economies of scale don’t work. However, this limited scope leaves little room for experimentation and learning.
The other notable missing piece in the mass customization world is media. I don’t think many people craft along with Martha Stewart‘s TV show or watch “Ace of Cakes” while baking, but they do learn little tidbits of info they can share while chatting with friends or family. Customization companies ought to consider including some editorial guidance in their offerings. Perhaps while designing custom sneakers Nike could teach a bit about color theory.
Physical Interaction: People want to be able to say “I made this!” - The pride in creation is probably the most overlooked aspect of human psychology in this market. Crafter’s who make jewelry have no expectations of being the next Tiffany, but being able to make a nice basket weave bracelet will certainly impress their social circle. We live in an increasingly automated world mediated by screens. Producing an honest to goodness physical artifact is a vanishingly small part of most people’s lives. This scarcity is also opportunity for new offerings.
This is an important point as it also could meaningfully change the economics of customization businesses. Generally, choices in customization are limited because of labor. Systematizing production is key to keeping prices affordable. However, if these companies are able to shift final assembly to the customer without suffering a major loss of quality it could allow for more creative and exploration based offerings. This is basically what is driving the explosive growth in companies like iFixit and Sparkfun. Both have built businesses selling kits that far outpace the success of “Customizers”. By selling parts and information, but leaving assembly to the customer they can offer a broad selection, but keep the economics in line.
Fun: Flow, or Forgetting the psychological aspects of making: The tail end of the survey shows that people craft for psychological benefits as much as producing a product. Again, configurator based approaches make this hard to replicate, but perhaps the solution lies is what Etsy has done building a community around their marketplace offering and curating the best parts of it. I’ve talked to many people who have spent hours surfing, researching, and getting inspired on Etsy. Customizers need to stop thinking about their product as only what they charge for and fill out the offering that brings people to the site in the first place.
Mass customization hasn’t taken off yet, but as Leo McGarry once said “In the history of everything that has ever worked, there was a time when it didn’t”. Mass Customization is no different!
