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Mass Customization and the Outdoors Industry - I’d Like Another Shot!
I recently went way back into my files to find a business plan Jeremy Hanks and I wrote in 2003 (the plan got us to the finals in the UEC in 2003) for a company that would manufacture mass customized outdoor clothing and equipment. After digging up the plan I read over it again (I am using it as an example business plan in my Westminster entrepreneur class) and realized how wonderful this idea really is. In my class lecture on Monday night I talked in great detail about the plan and fell in love with it all over again.
Mass customization is giving the customer the ability to build their own product within a set of manufactures predetermined options. For example, when you order a Dell computer you are buying a mass customized product.Â
Don’t confuse mass customization with customization. Mass customization applies rules and parameters to customization to make it cost effective. Mass customization is scalable where full customization is not. Giving the customer a product experience that they define inside of parameters that a manufacture defines is the future of product development.
When researching the plan, we came across a great little company in Eugene, Oregon that is mass customizing outdoor clothing. The company is beyondfleece. We actually traveled to Beyondfleece in an effort to feel out the owner and to see if he would be interested in selling the company. Our plan was to win the UEC in 2003 and use that as a catalyst to raise money to buy BeyondFleece. We’d then apply all we know about Internet marketing and manufacturing and take the business to the next level.
Well, we didn’t win the UEC and we didn’t raise the money needed to buy the company. I honestly think if I could raise the money I’d like to go back and give this another try. Anyone have a couple million I could borrow? 
No dinero here, but I have a desire to add the ability to customize my product line at some point in the future. We do bamboo fly fishing rods and I’d like for my customer to drag and drop the components that he wants on this rod and “design” his own rod.
Any cheap software tools out there to do that?
Left by David on 09/14/2006The software to do that exists but to my knowledge it does not exist for what you want it to do right off the shelf. It requires custom programming.
Feel free to contact me if you have more questions,
Left by ctknud on 09/14/2006