One of the main tenets of the Snowflake Effect is that of mass customization and ultimately, personalization. As such, I try to follow trends that would indicate if things like mass customization are actually starting to happen and if William Gibson’s great line that “The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.” is being realized.
On-demand manufacturing is one area of interest. A recent article in Fast Company from October 1, 2009 called “Zazzle Dazzles on Demand” talks about the success that Zazzle is having with this new method of manufacturing. Since 2005 they have been focused mostly on customized printing of things like T-shirts, mugs, shoes, business cards, etc. Zazzle is now seeing over 200,000 new items designed on their site DAILY! Most orders are processed in 24 hours and they claim to be able to go from order to finished product in as little as 17 minutes. For example they recently enabled Keds the shoemaker to have individual customers, many of them children, design each individual panel of the shoe (as well as the insole) with art or designs of their choosing.
This radical shift from the days of mass production, where everything was the same, is not only affecting manufacturing but perhaps more so sales and business models. These quotes from Zazzle’s CEO Robert Beaver exemplify the ways their customers are evolving to take advantage of these new capabilities. He notes, for example, that:
“The competitive mentality is If I help somebody else, that’s going to take dollars out of my pocket. But that isn’t the way our sellers are thinking. More sellers enhance the overall quality of the marketplace.”
And he also made the point that many of their biggest customers such as Disney, LucasArts, Matell and Getty Images, learned that:
“... this wasn’t about posting your 10 most popular designs—that’s retail. Unlock everything.”
These observations are very much in keeping with one of the undercurrents of the Snowflake Effect which Eric Duval and I speak to a lot: that of now living in a world of abundance where choice and design are becoming the critical value propositions. While the Zazzle example is a relatively mild degree of mass customization, at least compared to what I see coming, this is a here and now example that shows how we are also headed for a society of “prosumers” where we are not nicely segregated into being either a producer or a consumer but rather part of a totally new set of roles and rules where each of us are both consuming and producing concurrently.
I’ll continue to bring you more examples of these future trends and directions in the hopes that it helps you to see how these changes will impact your world and life and helps you be better prepared for and gain more benefits from the Snowflake Effect.
-- Wayne
Every time I see blogs as good as this I KNOW I should stop surfing and start working on mine!
Posted by: designer handbag imitation | April 20, 2011 at 06:35 AM