

Mass customization will revitalize american manufacturing - triviatise
http://mashable.com/2011/04/13/mass-customization/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

======
tarr11
I worked on Levi's Original Spin program (originally called Personal Pair) in
1997-99 time frame as a software engineer.

A core problem with mass customization (at least of clothing) still exists
today - there are so many options available locally without customization, and
it's so much easier to purchase, that it creates a very high bar to meet.

I don't think it was the lack of technology to design the jeans. It was the
lack of technology that could actually produce them to the measurements that
were recorded. At the time, Levi's added some more measurements than just
waist and inseam (I forget what they were) In fact, I suspect that if you have
some fancy Kinect enabled measurer, it would create lots of new measurements
that apparel manufacturers would have a tough time producing, no matter where
they were located.

Yes - Levi's "Personal Pair" program (before 1997) was about fit (not about
color), which was very difficult to make successful. It attracted older women
looking for hard to fit jeans, who were not the target market (which for
Levi's was optimally 18-25 year olds)

Levi's then pivoted, and rebranded it to Original Spin. For this article to
say that it failed because Levi's "didn't offer color" is an
oversimplification. Levi's Original Spin offered many different colors, washes
and fits. There was a bar code embedded in the jeans, and a website where you
could reorder the jeans online (yes even in 1998).

Even when they pivoted, buying jeans online was not an easy thing to do online
(is it much better today??) So this made for a very expensive program,
requiring in-store fittings, new technology, high-touch retail, and lots of
returns. Even worse, you had to wait a week or two for these jeans.

We even had a laser body scanner at the store in Union Square in SF to take
your measurements so someone didn't have to touch you with a tape measure. We
had a special factory in Tennessee that made these jeans using a special
factory program called Made To Measure (I think that was the name)

Then, because of manufacturing challenges - jeans shrink when you wash them
within a certain tolerances - they didn't fit right a lot of the time when you
finally received them. So there were a lot of returns. And a customized
product that is returned .... is worthless for resale.

Not sure which of these factors have changed in the past 10-15 years (at least
for jeans) but mass customization is not necessarily going to change the face
of American manufacturing in the way the author suggests. Perhaps there have
been manufacturing changes that can make jeans fit better and be constructed
in a more sophisticated manner.

------
nickzoic
> Mass customized product strategies require local production to reach
> customers quickly and require highly skilled labor [...]

I think there's two very big assumptions right there: actually, international
air shipping is pretty quick and skilled labor is widely available.

------
maukdaddy
This guy is rehashing a concept that universities have been teaching since the
90s. The era of mass customization is actually behind us, replaced with
purpose built hardware and software (i.e. iPad, iPhone, Xbox, etc.)

~~~
triviatise
mass customization never happened. The question is, is the time now? I think
advances in tech solve a lot of the supply chain issues. Are there
corresponding improvements in manufacturing? Do the machines have to improve
or just the software controlling them? Is it a data problem or a physics
problem?

