Customizing Invades Area of Mass Production
Got a small waist and wide hips and can’t find jeans that fit? Levi Strauss & Co. has a solution: they’ll make a “personal pair” to your exact measurements for about 25% more than the cost of a regular pair.
Levi’s is one of the first retailers to use technological advances to offer custom-made clothes at close to mass-production prices. Some analysts think it’s the beginning of an era of customization that will change the way people buy things as much as the mass production techniques of the industrial revolution did more than 100 years ago.
“The era of mass customization will be as important in the 21st century as the industrial era was in the 19th century. It will become the new imperative,” said Joseph Pine, founder and president of the Strategic Horizons consulting firm and author of a book on mass customization. “Once products become commodities, the only way to push them is by lowering the price. Customization is the way around that.”
Levi’s customers have their waist, hips, inseam and rise (the distance from the front waistband between the legs and up to the back waistband) measured. Jeans are tailored to these measurements in Mountain City, Tennessee, and mailed within three weeks.
“Even with more than 170 fits and sizes in our regular line we found many women still required a very special fit,” said Heidi LeBaron-Laupp, director of marketing for Levi’s Personal Pair.
Levis plans to extend customization to women’s Dockers pants and men’s jeans and is exploring joint operating agreements to manufacture customized women’s undergarments. “The companies that can make a personal connection with customers will gain a competitive advantage,” said LeBaron-Laupp.
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Other industries have beaten retailers to mass customization. Grand Metropolitan’s Burger King’s “Have it Your Way” marketing program promised more than it delivered--you could get a burger medium raw, for example, but not with bacon and tomato--but it was still sufficiently distinctive to differentiate it from McDonald’s and fire up sales.
Many magazines tailor versions to parts of their readership. The Philadelphia-based Farm Journal prints 7,000 to 10,000 different editions each month for its 800,000 subscribers with articles and ads targeted to each farmer’s profile. Individual Inc. in Burlington, Mass., aims to give readers what they want with its “First!” newsletter, whose computer system searches 400 sources for relevant articles. Subscribers rate them and the computer keeps refining the searches so that relevancy ratings of 40% to 60% in the first week typically rise to 80% to 90% by the fifth week.
Hotel chains such as the Ritz-Carlton keep tabs on guests to the point of noting their pillow and cookie preferences, so that guests can check into a Ritz anywhere and expect the same treatment.
“The more a customer invests in telling you his individual tastes, the less eager he is to repeat the process with another supplier,” said Pine.
Japan’s Paris Miki eye-wear store in Seattle designs and manufactures in an hour’s time glasses to fit a digital picture it has taken. Music Writer of Los Gatos, Calif., produces sheet music in different keys to individuals’ requests. Bali is toying with ways to customize bras, and Osaka’s National Bicycle Industrial Co. Ltd., builds bike frames to individual riders’ measurements from 11 million possible variations.
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To be sure, customizing mass products has not always been successful. Estee Lauder Co. has built a thriving prescriptive business on individualized toner shades, but other discover-your-self cosmetic kiosks have fizzled. American Greetings Corp. took a $25-million write-off on its personalization unit, and Hallmark Cards Inc. pulled back on its make-your-own-cards kiosks. These systems might have been limited because they didn’t record or remember individual preferences, remind customers when to buy a card or display past selections so they didn’t send the same card out twice--or remember the copy if the sender wanted to repeat.
Of course, mass customization isn’t appropriate for true commodity businesses like gasoline or wheat, or where customers don’t want or need personalized products or attention, said Pine. And it won’t work where they won’t pay a premium.
“Sometimes it’s simply too expensive to justify for low-end products,” said Rick Dove, director of strategic analysis for the Agility Forum at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. And customers sometimes don’t know what they want until they see it, he said.
But Pine said customization will grow because people want less choice. “They want exactly what they want, when, where and how they want it. Whenever a customer takes home attributes he doesn’t really want, or buys a product without benefits he truly cares about, it’s a waste.”
