Mass customization at Burberry

Few things would be more luxurious than a truly custom-made product that is tailored to your every desire. That, of course, is expensive but there is a medium ground between a truly custom product and something that is merely off the rack. Mass customization promises customers a sort of unique offering. I say “sort of [...]

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Carving or printing replacement parts

How do you get replacement parts? In a developed country the answer is pretty simple. For some things (e.g., car parts), you may need to go through a dealer or specialized retailer. For others, you may be able to just stop by a general hardware store. But what if you are in a developing nation? [...]

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What does “Made in America” look like?

We are nearly two months into the baseball season and we have yet to have a baseball related post. Now that the Red Sox have crept above 500, it is time to rectify the situation. Check out this video on making baseball gloves: The interesting part of this to my mind is what it says [...]

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Supply chain contracts and mass customization

So here is an interesting business model that leads to a nice supply chain contracting story (from Finnish shoe firm pays lifetime royalties, Oct 12, Globe and Mail). Pomarfin, a Finnish shoemaker, was facing increased competition from cheaper firms manufacturing in Asia and was forced to look for ways to differentiate its products. It seemed [...]

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Making sofas

I lived in North Carolina for five years and have since been somewhat fascinated by the furniture industry. North Carolina is to sofas  as Michigan is to sedans. In some ways, furniture seems like cars and other consumer durables. Buying a full bedroom set or a nice sofa and armchair is pretty big purchase both [...]

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Furniture made to move

I have spent enough time in North Carolina to be interested in a good furniture story. I gotta admit that I have never heard of anything quite like this: Made.com let’s people vote on what styles it should sell and then builds winning styles to order. There are two intriguing aspects. First, there is the [...]

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Counting cars

On May 1, North American car makers (or more accurately, their dealers) had 2.1 million units on hand. That sounds like a lot — and I would certainly hate to have to wash all those vehicles — but in the grand scheme of things, it is remarkably little (Carmakers turn into inventory control freaks, May [...]

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Customization and the newsvendor

I am teaching the core operations class again this quarter and we are just getting to supply chain management and the newsvendor problem. Thus I was happy to see an article on a custom shirt maker in Sunday’s New York Times that makes a perfect talking point (Putting Customers in Charge of Design, May 16). [...]

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The sizzle of Zazzle

So how much variety do you want? Zazzle.com seems to think that people want a lot of variety and strives to offer customized products fast. Here is how the firm’s web site describes what they do: Infinite and Instant, Zazzle is the only on-demand retail platform for consumers and major brands, offering billions of retail [...]

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