The idea, which according to the Google Books Ngram Viewer peaked around 2009, was that physical products would be manufactured on-demand and tailored

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2024-11-26 16:00:03

The idea, which according to the Google Books Ngram Viewer peaked around 2009, was that physical products would be manufactured on-demand and tailored for individual customers’ specifications. Someone purchases a widget and includes notes about its size, shape, or (I don’t know) squishiness; the manufacturer adjusts their tooling, or whatever, and makes a one-of-a-kind instance of the product, shipping it directly to the customer. Apparel tended to be spoken of as well-suited for mass customization; Sols, a now-defunct startup that made 3D printed insoles between 2013 and 2017, was probably the best example of mass-customized apparel before TheMagic5’s hot wire-cut swim goggles launched in 2016.

The product that I mass-customized was a piece of consumer electronics called The Public Radio. We had backed into mass customization in a weird way, taking a feature that would typically have been field-adjustable and locking it down. Specifically, we designed The Public Radio — a battery-powered FM radio — such that it did not have a tuning knob and instead needed to be tuned to the customer’s requested frequency during the manufacturing process.

This was silly, but also (you may have to trust me on this, depending on your preferences) kind of clever, and resulted in a cascade of subsequent decisions. For one, we knew more or less out of the gate that it would be impossible to find an overseas contract manufacturer to make The Public Radio; we would simply never reach the sales volume sufficient to justify drop-shipping them, and furthermore our production process was bound to be fairly complex and would require a contract manufacturer that was nimble and driven at least partly by curiosity, rather than purely by scale. In parallel, we knew that The Public Radio was going to be a fairly high-touch product and would probably be priced and marketed to an audience with some disposable income and a sense of whimsy. This led directly to The Public Radio’s second-most notable design feature: We chose to house the radio inside of a squat little mason jar.