Because MCKN is a knowledge platform concerning the topic of Mass Customization, it is supposed to give interesting information for experts and also for inexperienced persons on this topic. Several books have been written on the topic of mass customization that are appropriate for persons with different experiences. In this blog post, we want to introduce three books that represent different levels of knowledge to give an overview of basic literature.

Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Competition (B. Joseph Pine)

The first book we want to introduce is one by Joseph Pine, the pioneer on mass customization. Pine is a long standing expert, who has set grounds for mass customization strategies. His book is the basic literature on mass customization and was the first to deal with this topic intensively. The book description allows a closer look on the book:

“The mass production of standardized goods was the source of America’s economic strength for generations and became the model for successful industries. Today, that model is a major cause of the nation’s declining competitiveness. As Joe Pine makes clear, innovative companies are embracing a new paradigm of management - mass customization - that allows them to create greater variety and customization in their products and services at competitive prices, or better. He explains mass customization in its historical context, demonstrates why mass production cannot work in turbulent industries, and outlines how new forms of competition have led to greater variety and customization. Based upon academic and field research, his work is a thoughtful analysis and commentary on when and how managers in both service and manufacturing industries can make the transition to mass customization. He details the strategies, methods, and organizational transformations required to develop, produce, market, and deliver individually customized goods and services, and shows managers how to analyze their own industries to determine if they should shift to mass customization.“

The Customer Centric Enterprise: Advances in Mass Customization and Personalization (Mitchell M. Tseng and Frank T. Piller)

This book gives examples of companies that implemented Mass Customization strategies. Based on these examples and asking experts and scientist for their opinions and experiences, recommendations for implementing such strategies are made. The book is suitable for people with basic understandings on mass customization and a few experiences on the topic. The book’s description gives an overview of the content:

“Companies are being forced to react to the growing individualization of demand. At the same time, cost management remains of paramount importance due to the competitive pressure in global markets. Thus, making enterprises more customer centric efficiently is a top management priority in most industries. Mass customization and personalization are key strategies to meet this challenge. Companies like Procter&Gamble, Lego, Nike, Adidas, Land’s End, BMW, or Levi Strauss, among others, have started large-scale mass customization programs. This book provides insight into the different aspects of building a customer centric enterprise. Following an interdisciplinary approach, leading scientists and practitioners share their findings, concepts, and strategies from the perspective of design, production engineering, logistics, technology and innovation management, customer behavior, as well as marketing.”

Mass Customization: An Enterprise-Wide Business Strategy (David J. Gardner and Frank T. Piller)

This book provides a great overview on mass customization for inexperienced people. It explains basic terms and strategies and can be used to dive into the topic. This is a short abstract of the book’s description:

“This book explains mass customization (also known as build to order, assemble to order, configure to order, make to order and engineer to order) from the standpoint of discrete manufacturers and reviews why mass customization must be viewed as an enterprise-wide business strategy, not merely a departmental initiative. Companies with highly-configurable products need to combine the technical superiority of their products with operational excellence. A manufacturer needs to be able to seamlessly connect the customer to the enterprise so the hand-offs from organization to organization are efficient and keep the process moving forward to a timely completion and delivery.”

Digital Forming was founded in 2008 by four partners from the UK. The company developed a technology which makes it possible to design individual products with a 3D configurator. The configurator is based on an intelligent software, which evaluates in real time whether the configuration of a product is feasible and useful. This ensures that the individual products can be produced. Each creation is supposed to be manufactured and delivered within two weeks due to the brooksbrothers-cmr.net help of additive manufacturing. It is the aim of Digital Forming to make this technology affordable for a wide range of people.

Digital Forming has already won several innovation prizes and is often presented in the Media. BBC, The Economist, Forbes magazine and several others have reported about Digital Forming. In August 2009, it was represented at the Museum of Science in London.

Their webpage UCODO.com (User CO Designed Objects) is still in beta testing but will soon be available for everyone. If you want to learn more about Digital Forming today, check out: www.digitalforming.com

Today’s blog entry introduces two web portals that offer a freat overview of mass customized products:

www.milkorsugar.com: Milk or Sugar was founded in 2008 when its team realized an increasing number of online customization configurators. As they found this a very interesting development, they started a “collection” of mass customized products that can be created and bought online. Today, Milk or Sugar is an exciting web portal that allows its visitors to explore the vast array of mass customization possibilities. There are twelve categories, each of them having at least five or six subcategories - from music or sports to food or jewelry. The webpage gets updated constantly to keep its visitors up-to-date with the newest developments in mass customization.

www.egoo.de: Egoo is a German webpage that also features national and international mass customization offerings. Their database is not as big as Milk and Sugar’s collection, but they still offer a large number of shops. Next to their shop and gift suggestions, they also write different articles and blog posts concerning the topic of mass customization, such as tutorials or tips to handle the product configurators.

Chocolate, Perfumes, Handbags - as there is hardly anything that one cannot customize today, Deutsche Welle has produced a short film about different mass customization companies on the German market. The film deals with their development, their challenges and their Moneygram money order product ranges and tells the companies’ success stories. The video also features Frank Piller, who is talking about the development of mass customization in the last couple of years and explains why mass customized products are so successful nowadays.

The video is available at: http://www.youtube.com/deutschewelleenglish

Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore have recently uploaded an interesting video on YouTube, in which Joe Pine discusses the benefits of a mass customization strategy for companies. In this two minutes video he stresses the most important key factors for a successful mass customization strategy. Using examples such as Land’s End or Dell, he gives good advices for other companies to improve their Economic Value.

The video is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_RGg4ICJfY

Custom Week is an exciting promotion effort of different mass customization companies such aschocri, blank label and shelfwires. The project was founded in 2011 and offers the possibility to draw attention to the mass customization movement and highlight companies currently offering thousands of customized and personalized items across a spectrum of categories (for example clothing, food, jewelry, furniture, etc.).

The intention of Custom Week is to make the broader public aware of the mass customization phenomenon: Users can take part in competitions and win customized items. Moreover, the companies constantly offer special deals, the so called “Sweet Custom Deals”. This makes it possible for the consumer to gain experience, explore all the different possibilities and experiment with different styles. For consumers that have never heard of mass customization before, the Custom Week has own sections explaining the phenomenon of Mass Customization and keeps its visitors up to date with the latest press releases on the topic. But also more experienced people can explore offerings they might not know yet and keep up with everything that might be new on the market.

Have a look and take part at: www.customweek.com.

As recently announced on this page, the “Create Your Own 2011” conference took place in Berlin on May 30^th and 31^st.

Part of the conference is a video, which is a great introduction about creating mass customized products and its possibilities. As many people still do not know about the possibilities of customization (especially via the Internet), this video is intended to bring mass customization to a broader audience. It offers interesting information about mass customization in the fashion industry, including opinions from mass customization experts, students from London College of Fashion and random consumers.

The clip (16mins) has been directed by the London College of Fashion (LCF), under the leadership of Susan Jenkyn Jones, and has been produced by a team of professionals working for large European broadcasters such as BBC or Deutsche Welle. The Movie had its first screening at the CYO 2011 Event in Berlin, and is now available for download and streaming at http://vimeo.com/25132966.