Mass Customization market landscape

Posted on August 5, 2010 by treehouselogic

The Mass Customization market landscape has changed dramatically in the past year or so. We’ve seen the advancement of a few key sub-sections of the market. Here’s an overview of co-creation landscape.

Consumer Customization Offerings

On the consumer facing side, we’ve seen the market emerge into three key sections:

1) Social / Mobile

Mobile is the new black. There are myriad Android and iPhone apps that offer customization options like outfit building and food creation. The opportunity is to give the user power to creatively build your products in the context of mobility, ie, touch-screen enabled, social network integrated, camera integrated, and potentially location aware.

co-creation, mass customization, configurator

Mass Customization landscape

2) Design-your-own micro sites

Many “design-your-own” websites focus on a specific vertical like shirts, jewelry, chocolate, or dog food. These sites are highly specialized, similar to the bespoke model of having a local vendor custom build a product to your liking. The Internet has extended the bespoke model globally, so shoppers can have specialists, ie craftsman, custom build items for them via a web interface.

3) Personalization

Most online personalization experiences allow you to customize components like background images, themes, content, friends, and images. The Internet is your oyster. You can personalize it to your liking, whether it’s content sources you follow on Twitter, music channels you create on Pandora, or images you share on Facebook.

Technology Solutions

On the technology site, the market can be segmented into four sub-sections of mass customization enabling platforms.

1) Dynamic image rendering solutions

Visual configuration allows users to select color options. The most common example is a t-shirt. Before you buy a simple t-shirt online, you select a size and color. Color and size selection is customization in its simplest form.

2) One-off, hand-built configurators

Many customizers have historically been built from scratch. These configurator projects are approached as custom website projects. All logic, content, and styling is hand-coded and built from the ground up. These configurators are delivered as a service without any real architectural backbone.

3) Sales configurators

The sales configurator market is as old as the hills. Even before the Internet, manufacturing companies used product configurators to compile build-of-materials (BOMs) and sales quotes. The objective of a sales configurator is component compatibility and accuracy, not user experience. These systems are rarely customer-facing, and they are usually a series of drop-down windows containing part numbers. Each selection requires a server-call to retrieve compatibility information from the server.

4) Customization platforms

Treehouse Logic is the first customization platform to offer both visual configuration and guided selling. Our platform is essentially a customization operating system that can be used to develop a fully branded customization experience. Like any good operating system, the goal is to offer the developer the tools to easily develop any look and feel, as well as empower them to make frequent content and styling changes without putting the application’s stability at risk.