Day two of the conference started with a keynote by David Gross and Jeff Beaver of Zazzle, together with James Johnson of Avery Dennison. Zazzle and Avery have recently launched a collaborative effort, the first example of which allows consumers to customise and order ring binders in a minimum quantity of one. In this instance Zazzle is acting as a ‘gateway’ to Avery’s manufacturing capabilities, with Avery producing the custom binders at their own facilities. James Johnson described clearly some of the challenges involved in setting up a mass customisation enterprise inside a business which has always excelled at mass production – Avery had already tried it’s own MC initiative before collaborating with Zazzle, but three days after the partnership launched there were 60 times the number of user-created designs than Avery had attracted in a year.

Looking back at my report on 2007′s MCP conference, I can see that I was somewhat disparaging of Zazzle, who I compared unfavourably to Ponoko and Threadless. Following this presentation I was much more impressed by what Zazzle has achieved and how fast they are advancing the benchmark of what consumers expect when customising products. For example, Zazzle has invested in body mapping capabilities more commonly used for special effects in the film industry, this allows custom clothing to be presented in a much more realistic way, with designs mapped onto folds in the fabric. And within the Zazzle system, users can open their own stores, setting their own prices for products and (in some cases) running a full time business by customising, and allowing others to customise, their designs.

Vintage Player by the3rdbase, printed on Heather Grey American Apparel T-shirt. The custom graphic maps over the folds of the fabric (click for larger image)

The first session I attended focussed on mass customisation in the shoe and footwear industries. The first paper, by Sergio Dulio, presented the case of Pakerson shoes, a traditional Italian shoemaker which has introduced a concept it calls Tailor Made – made-to-measure footwear based on a system of mass customisation which is largely invisible to the customer. At its first concept store in St. Petersburg, customers have their feet scanned and a computer model is generated of each foot. The customer is then able to choose from a menu of styles and see exactly how the shoes would look, the shoes are then handmade from a ‘library’ of existing lasts and patterns, and delivered in four weeks.

Next Matt Head and Andre Salles presented two papers, both concerning the Elite to High Street (E2HS) project at Loughborough University. This is a major research project running across the University’s Innovative Manufacturing and Construction Research Centre, the Sports Technology Institute and the Department of Design and Technology where Matt and Andre (and myself) are based. Matt’s paper presented his work with focus groups to establish exactly which aspects of a running shoe consumers are interested in customising, whereas Andre’s presentation detailed his research in understanding which anthropometric foot measurements need to be taken and how to evaluate discomfort, performance and injury risk. But since Matt has been promising for a while now to write a piece for this blog, I won’t go into these presentations too much, and hopefully it will give him a kick up the arse to do something

From the Elite to High Street (E2HS) project © Loughborough University)

Following Andre’s presentation, I left mid-session to rush up eight floors in order to catch Kate Herd’s presentation. Kate is researching the consumer customisation experience, the tangible and intangible elements from the point at which the customer decides to engage in the purchase of a customised product to the point at which the product is delivered, and beyond. The problem of course, is that this experience takes place over many weeks and at times which are ‘personal’ to the consumer: it’s not something which can be easily researched in a ‘laboratory’ environment. And simply asking people about their experiences doesn’t work either – memories are subjective and can be coloured by what the subject thinks the researcher wants to hear, or how they wish to represent themselves. To overcome these difficulties, Kate’s research has incorporated the use of ‘design probes’, a method which encourages users to self-document their actions and emotions in order to give insights into their opinions and feelings.

Freitag packaging, from Kate Herd’s Flickr set PhD in Mass Customisation

One of the key factors in using design probes is that they themselves have to be designed. Since the research subjects are documenting their experiences alone, without direct input from the researcher, the probes need to encourage the user in certain directions, to record information that is valuable and ignore what is superfluous, even when the subjects themselves do not know what is valuable and what is not. Kate revealed how, in a pilot study subjects had been encouraged to keep a diary, but the entries were often repetitive or simply said “nothing has happened”. In the revised study participants were given more specific instructions such as “Capture it”, “Describe it” or “Tell me stuff” together with tools such as a dictaphone, a digital camera and printer , sticker books etc. Whilst the study is still ongoing, it seems to be revealing some interesting insights into the way that consumers perceive brands which offer mass customised products.

A “Who did I tell map” from the pilot study, from Kate Herd’s Flickr set “Design Probes”

The revised design probe, from Kate Herd’s Flickr set “Design Probes”

After lunch Frank Piller presented a keynote speech. Frank’s presentations are always full of interesting anecdotes, one of my favourites this time concerned Adidas, who he has worked with extensively. Regarding miAdidas, the company’s venture into mass customised sports shoes, Frank recounted how Adidas have come to realise that people don’t go to miAdidas to improve their shoes, they go there to improve themselves (since a better fitting shoe will improve its owners performance). And so Adidas have introduced miCoach, a customisable coaching system intended to better improve your training.

Adidas miCoach © Adidas (click for larger image)

After the keynote I attended the Co-Creation and Open Innovation session. First to present was Martijn Pater, whose paper discussed some of the work of Fronteer Strategy, an Amsterdam based consultancy specialising in the facilitation of co-creation initiatives. Fronteer Strategy very much believes in Eric von Hippel’s notion of lead users as the key generators amongst consumers of innovative solutions, and their five guiding principles are to 1. Inspire Participation, 2. Select the Very Best (People and Ideas), 3. Connect Creative Minds, 4. Share Results, and 5. Continue Development.

The next presentation, by JanWillem Hoftijzer, was particularly interesting for me. JanWillem’s research is in a similar area to mine, looking at which products or product features consumers are most interested to customise and co-design, and then attempting to understand how consumers might be enabled to engage in that co-design. I’m hoping that we might be able to work more closely in future.

The final presentation of the session, by Katharina Braun, detailed her work looking at the Threadless community, and the ways in which advice and feedback affect the submitted designs. Katharina’s research has some interesting findings, specifically that the number of number of comments and degree of engagement are a predictor of the design’s success (regardless of the quality of the feedback, ie whether it is positive or negative). After the presentation I asked whether it was known if designs are successful because they change according to comments (ie respond to the market) or whether designs that are good to begin with attract the most comments. Right now it seems the research cannot answer that question, but it’s something Katharina plans to address.

In the final session I attended, the standout presentation was by Jouni Lyly-Yrjänäinen who entertainingly recounted his frustrations in trying to get hold of 12 black Teema dinner services from the Finnish Housewares company Iittala. When he first approached Iittala he was told the minimum order was 600 for a custom colour, though many other people had also asked for black. Unfortunately Iittala had no way of recording the level of demand – everyone who enquired was told the minimum order was 600. A couple of years later, when Iittala did release the Teema range in black, they didn’t include some plates in the range. And despite complaining and making personal contact with Iittala’s customer service manager, when the plates were released as a ‘limited time offer only’, Jouni only found out by accident. Luckily this frustration seems to have been fruitful – Iittala are now working with Tampere University of Technology where Jouni is based, and the Teema range is available in full, in black!