I launched this blog in October of 2008 and this is the 300th post. It is a milestone without any special significance except for being largish and round, but I thought I’d celebrate the occasion with a trip down memory lane. If you want to get a sneak peek at the next 300 posts Follow Me On Twitter or Subscribe to the Blog!

Lists, Numbers, and “Quantiness”

Read any guide to getting started with blogging and they will always tell you to do lists posts. This format has earned a reputation for being “empty calories for the mind”, but I can attest to the fact that it works and if done well can create a lot of value.

Personal Fabrication for Dummies is a post that breaks down the possibility of a “Bits and Atoms” world by highlighting the core technologies that power it.

10 Things 3D Printers Can Do Now was an attempt at link bait, but also a way to highlight the amazing and diverse capabilities of these tools

75 Creative Uses of the Spore Creature Creator didn’t get the attention it deserved, largely due to the game’s commercial flop. Still, the post is a testament to the amazing creativity you get when you enable people with fault tolerant CAD tools. The game play sucked, but there has never been a better way for people to learn the basics of 3D modeling. If EA is smart they will make use of that asset immediately.

Bits and Atoms by the Numbers compared 26 companies in the “Web Meets World” arena by web traffic as measured by Compete. While the comparison isn’t very telling since the business models vary so greatly, it is interesting to see which services are drawing lots of user, which struggle, and how they are growing or shrinking.

Design Secrets of Threadless was designed to create a cheat sheet for future designers to increase their chances of winning. Anthropomorphic food, humor, and zombies will all increase your chances of getting printed.

Some Random Ideas and Theories

Does the future of mass customization lie in the past, particularly Gilded Age Newport Rhode Island? I think so and explain my rationale here.

Where does the value in customization come from? The product or the process? Or something else? I think there are a myriad of factors.

I think websites are going to be able to generate revenue in ways that depend less on ads and more on physical goods or “Web Souvenirs“.

The biggest gains in customization are going to come from “boring products” like custom orthotics and “boring” industries like arts and crafts.

Famous Makers

One of the fun side effects of blogging is the tendency to notice potential post ideas anywhere you look. In my case I’d often run across “Celebrities” who also built things in their spare time. For instance, while fathering the USA, George Washington was an ardent interior decorator.

Walt Disney invented theatrical feature animation, theme parks, and was busy planning a utopian community of tomorrow, but when he had some downtime he would putter around machining model trains.

J.J. Abrams, creator of Lost, easily the biggest TV show of the 2000′s is a crafty guy in his off days. How owns a laser cutter and spends his precious fee time imagining a world where the virtual and real collide.

Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame gave a great TEDtalk about obsession, which in his case manifested itself in the creation of replica Dodo bird skeletons and replicas of movie props.

The Things We’ll Make With Mass Customization Tools

I think a lot about enabling technologies like 3D printers, laser cutters, and mills, but the really exciting stuff is what creative people do with them.

Take Harrison Krix an Atlanta based graphic designer who makes movie quality props in his spare time and shares his process step by step so anyone can learn.

The artists at Pixar are another group that are integrating 3D printing into the art making process be it with their amazing Zoetrope or models of characters. In any case I hope ZCorp is cutting them a deal on materials as their out

Speaking of Pixar, I wrote a post about how people use pop culture motifs as a way to experiment with fabrication as this list of Wall-E “cover songs” attests.

Ultimately, I hope to write less and create more, but if you want to keep up with all the latest mass customization/3d printing/bits and atoms news, please subscribe to Replicator.

I posted yesterday about a talk given by Jana Eggers, the CEO of Spreadshirt. Within 8 hours she had responded in the comments. In her blog she claims to be a “passionate customer advocate” and her behavior certainly backs that up.

She made some great points in her response that I wanted to share outside of the comments. Her comments are in bold.

“Spreadshirt does use Direct-to-Garment printing, but it is only a small fraction of what we do. Our core printing technology — which gives a Net Promoter Score that is double that of DTG — is plot printing.”

This is a major difference, the technology Spreadshirt uses provides much bolder color and also offers some interesting options like flocked and metallic finishes that are impossible with DTG. The video below provides a glimpse into how products are manufactured at their factory.

“I’m not sure what you mean by “seeing the service as a pure gimmick”. As gimmick isn’t a positive word, I’d love to learn more what you mean. Perhaps it is the quality that you have seen in the past with print-on-demand capabilities. Spreadshirt is known for its quality, and it is quality that is “hanger worthy” — meaning you can have it in your day-to-day wardrobe — even work wardrobe!”

I should have said “perceived by many to be a gimmick” and to be clear I meant customization as a whole and not Spreadshirt’s offering in particular. In my talks with potential customers and investors many have the belief that customized offerings are not competition for products found at retail, but rather niches or glorified marketing expenses. I chalk this attitude up to lack of imagination (people derided camera phones similarly) and the data collected by Spreadshirt provides some great data to the contrary.

“Regarding most DTG printing being below screen printing, this is true for the most part. DTG is better when you want a retro or faded look. Our plot printing is higher quality than screen printing (but is limited in colors). This is one of the reasons why people are choosing us.”

Product quality varies quite a bit between customization companies and even within product categories. I admire Spreadshirt’s decision to stick with one product and perfect it, rather than offering hundreds of products with little regard for quality.

Custom ecommerce is very different than traditional ecommerce. Amazon became the world’s largest store because it operates largely virtually, aggregating supply and demand, taking a cut of the transaction. Companies offering customization have to deal with the constraints of manufacturing in the physical world and optimizing those processes to yield great products. Perfecting one product category is hard enough without customization and I think companies with focus will have a greater chance of long term success.

“People do want to create, but the challenge is a bit different than just the ease of doing it. Most people don’t even know to answer the question. The survey we did asked people this question in many different ways. We didn’t just say, “Do you want to print something on a tshirt.” Most folks didn’t even know to say “print”. When we asked them about what their shirts expressed and what they wanted them to express, they more got the idea that what they see in the store can be done, but done personalized to their message.”

I totally agree. Customization is about a lot more than cool technology. It is a dramatic shift in the way we approach commerce. For the first time since the industrial revolution, mass market consumers are being given the opportunity to have a direct say in how their products look, feel, and function. This is a massive change made possible by advances in technology, but made will only become mainstream with an understanding of psychology.

I attended MIT’s Smart Customization Seminar last week and had the chance to spend the day with some of the brightest minds working in customization and open innovation. The day was filled with great presentations and I collected notes on the best.

Zazzle

Jeff Beaver, Zazzle co-founder, was there along with a few other Zazzler’s to talk about the launch of their new partnership with Keds. NIKEiD and other services allow you to pick the colors of your shoe, but Zazzle lets you go one step further and add custom artwork or graphics. Some quick notes:

- Within 48 hrs of launching their custom shoe service 13K designs had been created, there are now 100K total, and ~650 new designs are made each day

- For people under 30 there are more people with tattoos than blue eyes

- Zazzle stocks 27 different product offerings, ~1700 seperate skus, and offers 15 different types of embellisment

- Less than 1% return rate on Zazzle products

- Printing companies aren’t thought of as high tech, but Zazzle has an engineering team of ~50. Beaver discussed their dynamic rendering technology briefly. Zazzle has a clearlead in product visualization technology right now.

- Brand control and IP were themes that came up quite a bit. Almost all customization services ban curse words, but some companies have other interesting guidelines. For instance, Disney prevents customers on Zazzle from putting a Mickey Mouse graphic on the same garment as a Winnie the Pooh graphic. Apparently this would create some rift in the space time continuum of cartoon universes. In any case, it is interesting to see the thinking behind Disney’s brand control and the technical safe quards Zazzle has put in place.

Paragon Lake

Matt Lauzon, founder and CEO of Paragon Lake, a company that provides customized jewelry services to independent jewelers gave one of the best presentations of the day. Mass customization companies often seem more theoretical than real so it is nice to see a company shipping product.

- Matt made an interesting point about offering choice to customers in a customized setting. You can offer 10 base designs with 100 customizable options each or 100 base designs with 10 customizable options. His initial assumption was that 10×100 would be the preferred model, but the 100×10 approach was more popular. People have taste, but not design training. It makes sense that they would want to find something close to what they like and add a few finishing touches rather than having to design something from scratch.

Tikatok

Sharon Kan, Founder and CEO of Tikatok, spoke about her service which provides on demand book publishing like LuLu or Blurb, but with a focus on books by children. It seems like a straight forward concept and they announced a partnership with the Build a Bear workshop for the first time at the seminar. Very exciting news for a company that just recently launched.

Hyve AG

Hyve AG is a German innovation consultancy. They developed a social network/innovation community to help push Swaorvski beads to watch manufacturing companies. The goal was to tap design communities and have designers show what could be done with this raw material. The program was an amazing success garnering:

- 7.5MM page views

- Contributions 1700 designers in 48 countries

- Total cost: 5K Euros. This is a social media success story that should be repeated far more.

- A great point from the presentation was to spend effort highlighting the designer as much as the designs in these innovation communities. It makes sense, but very few existing creative communities do it.

Desktop Factory

Desktop Factory is a company working on a low cost 3D printer. CEO Cathy Harris gave a great presentation talking about the company, challenges face, and opportunities for development. Quick thoughts

- The desktop printing market broke the billion dollar mark for the first time last year, after being in existence for 20+ years. The biggest player in the market only have $150MM in revenue so it is still an open field

- There are about 364 layers in an object the size of the “ball in the cage” on the left

- I asked about the demographic of the people on their mailing list, 50% were in education, the other 50% were from design related enterprises

- Used a great buzzword – Automagically

Lars Hvam

Lars Hvam is a professor at the Technical University of Denmark. The content of this lecture was much more academic, but certainly interesting. Hvam’s case studies included a garage door company that was able to reduce delivery times from 12 weeks to 8 days with a customized manufacturing solution and many other similar stories. I also received a copy of his book which I will review here soon.

CustoMax

Bas Possen is CEO of Customax is a B2B company that helps enable customization in the European fashion industry. CustoMax offers a software package that helps information flow between the various parts of the fashion supply chain.

- Strong belief in mass customization at retail “Touch, Feel, Try” was his mantra. People want apparel suited to their tastes, but more importantly they want to see an article and have a reference for what their design will look and feel like.

- CustoMax software does simple things like making sure fabric is in stock in real time. Oversold fabric was a huge problem pre-CustoMax.

- Possen says body scanners are a gimmick and it is much easier and cheaper to have a tailor take measurements. The human touch can eliminate many useless variables.

Proper Cloth

Proper Cloth – Seph Skerrit founded this company a few months ago and has already had a successful launch. Proper cloth allows businessmen to have customized shirts produced on demand for the fair price of $90. The only weakpoint of the offering is lack of options, All the shirts you can currently create look like the off the rack options at Macy’s, but Seph said more design options are coming soon.

Seph had a great insight that we need better ways to talk about customization. In the case of shirts a number alone is largely arbitrary, but combined with a manufacturer’s name you can get a better understanding of their offering. Seph has created a Rosetta Stone like comparison chart that shows how a Banana Republic shirt’s measurements compare to one from Zara or Brooks Brothers.

As a startup we are asking a lot of people to take a chance on us, so we thought it fitting to highlight some of the scientifically proven, quantitative research that has been done on customization/personalization.

Recently published info about a study that shows people who add bumper stickers, personalized license plates, and other “territory markers” are 16% more likely to engage in road rage and will hit the horn 2 seconds faster in a stressful situation.

Interestingly, the content didn’t make much of a difference (e.g. the “Save the Whales” crowd was no less aggressive the “Don’t mess with Texas” bunch). The theory is that people who invest time/money personalizing their cars are more likely to view them as personal space and more likely to take affront to perceived breaches of driving etiquette.

It would be interesting to see if a similar positive reaction to personalization exists? Am I any less sad when I lose my cellphone with custom ringtones, faceplates, and charms compared to a stock unit? Will I talk more about brands that allow me to customize my products?

Anecdotal evidence certainly exists in the premium people will pay for customized products. Here is a cross section of customized products targeted to a younger customers:

A customization premium exists and the more freedom you offer the larger it is. It is a compelling business proposition, but also an interesting academic one. If any researchers in the Cambridge area are interested in pursuing the psychology of customization please get in touch.