48,369,526 people have looked to 18 year old Blair Fowler for tips on the proper way to apply makeup via her YouTube channel. She doesn’t have any special credentials, but her makeup work seems fine to the unskilled eye. I’m honestly at a loss for words and amazed that such seemingly “mundane” (Not in the sense that it is bad, just “unproduced”) content has such a large audience.

I’ve been pessimistic about customization, but examples like this prove that there is a thriving desire for information and products to make things pretty and individualized. At some point entrepreneur’s will stop focusing on yet another print-on-demand service or custom dress shirt site and serve the market that channels like this highlight.

MailChimp is the world’s greatest email marketing service. The product works flawlessly, it is designed perfectly from the perspective of a small/medium business, and they are consistently innovative with their marketing. Instead of buying tons of AdWords they promote an API. Instead of providing bland documentation they create whimsical marketing guides. Instead of giving away schwag to random folks at a marketing tradeshow, they send it out to their customers. The resulting products of these efforts are great examples of “Bits & Atoms” marketing.

MailChimp Tshirt

As a holiday gift  the fine folks over at MailChimp printed and delivered TShirts to their customers. It is a nice American Apparel shirt and has a high perceived value. Of course it is easy to impress people when you give them something, especially physical products, but what if your budget is limited?

MailChimp Email Marketing Guides

Give them something that looks real, like the MailChimp email marketing guides. The guides are consistently well made, filled with great information, targeted to specific audiences, and designed to look like real books, often from a bygone era of design. The result is effective. When you download the PDF it feels like you are getting a valuable eBook rather than some self serving corporate document festooned with a generic logo.

The science behind it

There is a neuroscientific basis to my theory. Antonio Rangle a professor of neuroscience at CalTech performed an experiment where subjects bid on items based on a text description, a photo of the product, and the product on the shelf. Bids for the physical product were 50% higher than the other two presentations. It stands to reason the more physical looking a digital object is, the more perceived value it will possess.

Is it working?

It is easy to make cool schwag and design hip looking materials when you are a small company with a niche audience. MailChimp is a rapidly growing company with over 19,000 people using their API (including massive partners like SalesForce, Google, Twitter, and EventBrite). It is successful enough to give $1MM to partners that use its API. Clearly are doing well in business while maintaining a stunning, consistent, and quirky design ethic AND helping to bridge the digital and physical worlds.

3D printers are an amazing technology, but haven’t yet broken into the mainstream. Largely because companies haven’t figured out a way to profitably employ them. Yet. However, based on my Google Analytics I can see some interesting companies are looking into the technology. These are big companies and if they apply 3D printing to their businesses it will make for some really awesome products.

Marvel Studios

Marvel Studios, makers of Iron Man and the upcoming Thor movies has a big business selling licensed merchandise based on their films. What if instead of buying a figure off the shelf at Target you could have a version, with your face under the Iron Man helmet printed in 3D? Its a cool idea and one that someone at Marvel Studios shares:

Fire Mountain Gems

Fire Mountain Gems is an ecommerce powerhouse that serves the multibillion dollar home jewelry making market. Using their catalog and online shopping carts crafters crank out beautiful pieces of jewelry. It seems though that the folks at Fire Mountain might be interested in how 3D printing could expand their service offering:

Medtronic

Medtronic is a serious medical device manufacturer and could have a tremendous impact commercializing a technology like 3D printing in a variety of applications. Someone from their office searched for “3D print clothes”, but I’m not sure how that would fit into their current product offerings.

I’m not sure if these searches will ever lead to product offerings, but it is fun to imagine a future where 3D printers are used to entertain, adorn, and heal us!

I’ve written a few posts about how I don’t think mass customization will go mainstream any time soon. I assumed I’d be proven wrong eventually, but while getting my car serviced in a shop where some kids had control of the TV I found out it has already happened. Mass customization is being advertised on Nickelodeon via TV commercial.

The commercial is for a series of products called StyleLab, a brand of UBISoft that makes fashion design games for the Gameboy. You can design a necklace or a TShirt and have it produced in real life. Fulfillment is handled by ArtBeads.com, which has a fairly large audience with nearly half a million visitors a month.

While this product is being advertised broadly I don’t think it is the “Mosaic” of the space. The graphics are anachronistically bad, the web integration is a flash based nightmare, and the checkout process is horrendous. Still as far as I know this is the first time I’ve seen a consumer focused “Web to World” product offering advertised on TV.

It can also be a big mistake to evaluate kid focused services based on the metrics used for other sites. Club Penguin was a collection of limited flash games that succeeded to the tune of a $350MM acquisition by Disney because they developed a very secure chat client for kids.

One of the cooler aspects of the “game” is that you can preview your creation overlaid on a picture of yourself. The Gameboy’s limited capabilities don’t do this justice, but it is easy to imagine how this could be a more successful product on the iOS platform staffed by a team of competent designers. It is an interesting pioneer product and will be cool to see it executed in a better manner.

At the Nagano Olympics in 1998 executives from the Walt Disney Company noticed attendees trading small enameled pins. Each pin commemorated an aspect of a participating country’s culture, an Olympic event, or an aspect of the games e.g. the opening ceremony. Being canny marketers the Disney execs brought the concept to their theme parks. 12 years later the pins are a resounding success, available around every turn in their theme parks.

The pins interesting from a customization perspective for three reasons:

1. The manufacturing processes similar to those of laser cutting, CNC milling and “2.5D” custom manufacturing techniques. It wouldn’t be hard for a well equiped garage to knock out similar products.

2. They produce limited runs to maintain exclusivity. The pin business is robust, but every individual pin is limited in its production run. This feeds into the customers desire to be unique.

3. There is a subculture creating “Fantasy” pins. Often these take the Disney characters in salacious directions, but some create artistic homages to under represented themes.

While not truly a mass customized product this product line shows the infiltration of the limited run/customer driven thought process into the core of one of the world’s largest consumer brands.

Kids in the 1960′s grew up in a world with Eames furniture in their living rooms, fun and dangerous compounds in their chemistry sets, and toys that could make other toys. Two toys in particular stand out in this era of unbridled physicality.

Vac-U-Form

The Vac-U-Form is a miniature vacuum forming machine. The toy consists of a platform with small holes that allow air to be sucked through it and a frame that can hold small sheets of plastic over a heating element which makes them malleable . An object is placed on the table, the plastic/frame is flipped onto the object and a hand powered vacuum pump pulls out the air, draws the plastic over the object, and creates a “copy” of it.

This is an exact replica of larger industrial machines and is truly capable of creating almost any plastic shape, for almost any application you can imagine (as long as it is <4″ x 4″). Hobby train enthusiasts, hardware hackers, and other motivated groups could use these to make plastic enclosures for their projects.

Thingmaker

The Thingmaker consisted of a set of molds that you poured a heat sensitive plastic (Plastigoop) into. The molds were placed on an heating element and the plastic hardened into a final form ready to be played with.

Thingmaker was a platform product giving rise to a variety of “expansion packs” including: Fighting Men, Creeple Peeple, and Jillions of Jewels. Kids could pool resources and share molds to increase their manufacturing output. Timing was essential with the Thingmaker, molds left on the heat too long would forever damage the mold and those removed prematurely created a gooey mess, but for the true artisan impressive plastic objects could be fabricated.

Unfortunately, both toys relied heavily on heated elements and in an increasingly litigious society the profit quickly became unbalanced by potential liability. Both products have faded from the toy world, but are kept alive on ebay and fan web pages.

My hope is that a generation of Maker parents will be able to revive toys like this. Used in conjunction with other interactive toys like Lego NXT the potential for rewarding play and creation is immense. You could design a skeletal robot with Legos and fabricate an aesthetically pleasing shell using vacuformed components, or undertake a million different projects which is the beauty of these tools. They help make the manufactured world more understandable which in turn increases the number of people who can participate in it. The United States has lost stature as a manufacturing power for a number of reasons, but you have to believe it is partly due to people not learning at an early age how much fun it can be.

Techno Source produces toys that contain electronic and web-based components. One of their high profile launches has been a line of interactive jewelry powered by “Clickables” technology in partnership with Disney‘s new Pixie Hollow MMO game. When a child buys Clickables jewelry it unlocks virtual goods in the game. What makes this offering special is that kids can share these virtual goods by touching the jewelry together in the real world. Ginny McCormick, interactive director at TechnoSource, was recently interviewed by Virtual World News and shared insights into a very interesting “Web Meets World” product.

Creativity as a game mechanic

“And there’s something incredibly appealing about creating your own fairy. I’ll laugh about it with my husband: I need to do something for work, and I’ll be stuck designing a fairy for hours. There’s something magical about that process and girls really get excited about it.”

Games don’t have to be about killing monsters or racing cars. A well built tool that allows people to easily design something can be more fun and rewarding than a traditional first person shooter or racing game.

Social Networks: Facebook and Face-to-face

One of Ginny’s observations is that parents limit their children’s playtime online. In order to keep kids engaged with their brand they create offline value which allows kids to interact online or in the schoolyard. The jewelry approach is also a great way to build virality into the product since the girls will be showing it off to friends.

Enhance existing behaviors, don’t try to create new ones

“At Techno Source we always look with technology for ways to take classic play patterns that have engaged girls for decades and make them better. It’s not changing the way girls play, but using technology to enable those.”

Can toymakers build great virtual worlds?

“It depends on the toy, but building a virtual world is a full time job. It’s a mix of a lot of disciplines. One of the best things is that virtual worlds are constantly changing and evolving. Toys are manufactured and shipped in the box. I think one of the reasons Clickables are successful is that we can make updates very quickly. What’s physically programmed is a very minor experience. We have a whole lot that we can change and keep up to date.”

This is an important point. The major toymakers have become expert at offshore manufacturing, IP licensing, and television advertising at the expense of invention. These activities are invaluable, but don’t get at the core of fun which is part of the reason video games have hurt the toy industry. These new technology companies get that customers want fun, irrespective of how it is delivered, and it is often by playing with friends. Tech focused toy companies are helping kids connect rather than focusing on injection molding and 30 second commercials.

Games add long term value to toys

A lot of parents I know complain about their kids discarding toys quickly. Even something special like a Build-a-Bear custom bear might be cast aside after a few days or weeks. By adding a component that encourages repeat use and regular playtime toys gain an extra lease on life.

New shopping paradigms enabled by technology

“For example, at Toys “R” Us we have a Clickables point-of-purchase display. If you’re in the girls aisle, you’ll see a display with a Clickables sensor on it. Girls can touch their bracelet in the store and unlock something in Pixie Hollow. Because of the way the technology works, in theory we could change what’s unlocked on a weekly basis so girls are always getting something new and exciting and relevant”

This could be a great win for struggling toy retailers. It would make sense for them to create a “private label ” offering where they can make their stores destinations for new content.

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Christmas is fast approaching and all of us have that sophisticated aunt who is really hard to shop for. You know the one, always has her nose in a great work of literature, ever eager to discuss the weighty philosophical issues of the day, or tending a greenhouse of exotic specimins. What can you get for a woman of such learned tastes?

If you answered “sad clown fingernails”, you’ve hit it exactly.

The makers of the ImagiNail fashion printer have made that dream a reality, creating a technology that can automatically decorate your fingernails with an endless selection of art from Elvis to Norman Rockwell to the aforementioned clowns.

The technology is interesting, but the website doesn’t have much data on specifications. It seems like lining the print head with the fingernail would be pretty tough, but if done correctly it could be a great addition to a nail salon. It might be a little tacky, but it does offer true “Personal Fabrication” and a way to extend personal expression from blogs to the body. I just hope there are no “dogs playing poker” options in the gallery.