Custom Mass Manufacturing

We collectively have the impression that there are two kinds of products; "mass-produced", and "custom produced". With advances in CNC (bringing their cost down, and their ease of use up) a whole host of Custom Mass Manufactured products are becoming available as more and more companies build business models around Custom Mass Manufacturing. I'll profile more of them in this space as time goes by.

These are products that are chosen from a virtual catalog, then ordered with custom specifications (within parameters), made just-in-time with CNC equipment and shipped very quickly to the end customer. Greater still is this idea coupled with the ability to submit one's own product designs, and have them manufactured for the same costs as mass manufactured versions. A great example is online t-shirt companies like Wordans. This business model will gradually push outwards to encompass more of what we buy, from tables to toys, from clothing to shoes, from eye glasses to jewelry, from carpet designs to wall paper.

The following article defames the word "manufacturing" a bit, it assigns it all the properties of mass-manufacturing, but it does talk at length about the concept of efficient small-run fabrication.

If anything, we’re talking about a kind of materialization of ideas. Slick connections between ... your imagination, a circuit board and a 3D printer. It’s artful for its scale and personalization. Small-scale, passionate, individual ideas made material.

What we are talking about are emerging “materialization” - not manufacturing - processes. What makes it worth talking about is that it is the power of creation that manufacturing is able to achieve, but done at an entirely different scale - quicker, cheaper, individually, with fewer intermediaries and fewer incumberances.

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