New Zealand-based 3D printing online marketplace and service provider Ponoko has partnered with German-based fabber Formulor to open a making hub in Berlin. It means EU-based creators using the Ponoko online making system can now choose to have their products made in Berlin – paying just a fraction of the shipping costs which has made [...]

Specialty Fabrics Review is the official publication of the Industrial Fabrics Association International (IFAI), a not-for-profit trade association with more than 2,000 member companies representing the international specialty fabrics marketplace. The October issue of the magazine contains a detailed article by Janice Kleinschmidt on the increasing use of mass customization in the fabrics sector. (I [...]

New Zealand-based online making system Ponoko and ShopBot Tools, a U.S.  designer and manufacturer of affordable CNC tools for digital fabrication of wood, plastic and aluminum products, have combined to launch 100kGarages.com which will serve as a network of local digital makers that will enable users to get “almost anything custom made and delivered”. David [...]

1. During the summer, Forbes magazine interviewed Jeffrey Housenbold, Chief Executive of Shutterfly, the online supplier of customized photo-based goods. It provides an interesting overview of the way the company addresses the question of ‘how much choice is enough choice?’ and preventing situations where customers get overwhelmed by the level of choice. It (the degree [...]

A new ‘customization portal’, MilkOrSugar has recently been launched by ILUMY, an Amsterdam based agency of designers and entrepreneurs. At MilkOrSugar, visitors can check pricing, shipping destinations, payment options and the number of basic models for each vendor. The site only publishes products that can actually be completely ordered, paid and shipped online. So car [...]

David Sifry, the founder and former CEO of Technorati, has announced a first public beta (test version) for a new personalized travel guide service called Offbeat Guides. Offbeat Guides create personalized, up-to-date travel guides that cover over 30,000 travel destinations, using a combination of search technology and curation by both amateur and professional travel experts.  [...]

As part of the re-activation of this blog, I’ve decided to include an occasional update containing links to stories of relevance to anyone interested in the progress of the mass customization business model and all the related trends that have come to prominence in recent years. So, here goes: The website of Colby College in [...]

The ranks of online marketplaces for user-designed apparel has been swelled by the arrival of Yerzies. This new company allows anyone to create, purchase or sell their own customized tee shirts, hoodies and other apparel items. In addition to the ability to upload images for printing on a t-shirt or other item of clothing, Yerzies [...]

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 make, buy [...]

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 own designer”, [...]

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” [...]

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 [...]