Back in November 2006, I speculated as to the type of businesses which might emerge using a hybrid of mass customization, crowdsourcing, micro manufacturing and online factory business models. One such hybrid has emerged recently in New Zealand. Ponoko describes itself as the world’s first personal manufacturing platform where anyone can click to [...]

Internet custom products marketplace company Zazzle recently announced that it had acquired Confego, a San Francisco Bay Area company that provides software that enables brands to offer fully customized apparel, bags and footwear designed from the ground up. Confego co-founders Brennan Mulligan and David Gross have joined Zazzle effective immediately.

Confego manages order fulfillment and [...]

The ARTIVIDUUM fashion label recently has recently opened a store in Frankfurt, the German metropolis on the Main river. In February 2007, owner Verica Hauch opened the doors to her new store. She opted exclusively for tailored and, more interestingly from this website’s perspective, mass-produced customized clothing. She uses the slogan “Be your [...]

Kerry and Bryce Moore. Designers and owners of Context Furniture in Royal Oak, Michigan, USA, have written a guest article in Metromode, an online magazine based in Michigan.  In the article (written as a series of posts over a week in February), they explain how their company has utilised mass customization and manufacture on demand [...]

I am a little late in writing about this, but it is worthwhile: Last month The Guardian, a UK newspaper, described how Moshe Einat is developing new inkjet technology that uses thousands of ink drops rather than a small number of nozzles.
Einat is a lecturer and researcher at the College of Judea and Samaria [...]

Auto Express, a British car magazine, reports in a short news item that BMW are:
“…working on a design for a super-efficient factory that can make bespoke cars in five days, instead of the current wait of up to six weeks. But there’s one hitch - it could be eight years before the “fully flexible” production [...]

The latest edition of academic publication ‘International Journal of Manufacturing Technology’ is a special issue on e-Manufacturing and Mass Customization. The issue is guest-edited by Dr. Pingyu Jiang, of the State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering, part of the School of Mechanical Engineering at Xi’an Jiaotong University in China.
In his editorial, Dr. Jiang [...]

There have been a few recent articles from various sources regarding the U.S. auto industry, which provide an interesting basis for a discussion about the role of mass customization in the future of the automotive sector.
In Industry Week, a recent feature by Yorgos Papatheodorou and Michelle Harris, which primarily dealt with the geographical spread of [...]

In TheManufacturer.com, there is an interesting guest editorial by Harald Kofler, president of a company called American High Performance Seals. He speaks about the growing ease with which businesses can purchase customised industrial components at much lower prices than might be expected.  Articles by an executive of a company can often be categorised as [...]

As we draw towards the end of 2006, It is reasonable to say that the idea of empowering customers with a higher degree of control over their relationship with business has gained widespread acceptance. This basic idea has been researched in great depth over the last twenty years or so. Various terms and acronyms, such [...]

Morgan Miller, a 24 year old designer, has set up an offline customization store for women’s shoes in South Beach, Florida.  The store can turn around a customer’s design in just 30 minutes.  Her story was featured recently in the Miami Herald.

Dan Gilmore, Editor-in-Chief of Supply Chain Digest, has provided some interesting views on the question of off-shoring manufacturing from the United States to low-wage economies. His article is a commentary on a Wall Street Journal piece called “Still Made in the USA”.
He notes that “many companies that just have not achieved the level of [...]

Mass customization is always associated with a high degree of automation and machine-based manufacturing. After all, central to the premise of mass customization is that the product can be provided at a cost similar to mass produced alternatives. It is generally accepted that ‘craft’ production, with a high percentage of the total work [...]

3D CAD Software supplier Solidworks recently highlighted its work with Moobella, a Taunton, MA, USA-based company that has developed a vending system that allows customers to choose fresh, hard-packed ice cream flavors like cake batter and accompanying mix-ins like chocolate chips, and have a scoop of ice cream in their chosen mix within 45 seconds. [...]

VoodooPC, the specialist producer of personalized, high-performance PCs, has launched its first new model since it was recently taken over by HP.
The OMEN Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad Core uses the Intel Core2 Extreme Quad-Core processor. The company quotes the new processors as having 70% more processing [...]