As Industrial Designers, we have been predicting and shaping different concepts for customization, mass-customization and single-product-customization. The first is a way of customization, where big companies such as, DELL, Oakley or Apple give you the option to ‘customize’ your purchase. The customization is an aditional layer between you and a wide range of products, you can choose option A in combination with option C, which might resemble hard disk brand A in combination with screen size C, which gives you as a customer the feel of buying a unique and customized product, in reality this product is just one of the hundreds of possibilities, and the next customer might well order the exact same ‘unique’ product. In this case there is no real unique customiztion, it’s just the aproach to choosing one product from a wide range of product options.

The second type of customization, we refer to as ’single-product-customiztion’ is not that easy to find, and is not a result of mass industrialized production. We’ve found a good example of true-customization for you: Freitag.

The Switzerland based company, was started in 1993, by two bike-riding designers, who happen to live next to the busy truck route in Zurich. They came up with the idea to make custom messenger bags from those dirty 100′000-mile tarpaulins. The bags are unique, one-of-a-kind, made of recycled materials and still tough and waterproof. The bags are made from used truck tarpaulins, bicycle innertubes, car seat belts and used airbags. The customization part is where you as a customer, use the F-cut software to pick the truck tarpaulin, position the location of the cut out for the bag, and then tell the people at Freitag to start cutting away. The cool thing is, that you can combine the different tarpaulins, and you can see the pieces that have been taken out by other customers, so you can imagine that no two bags are the same. This is what we would like to call, customization.

So don’t be fooled by the million dollar companies, into buying a fake ‘customized’ product, when real customization is around the corner.

When you are making your next customized purchase, just remember this article, and think for a second, is this really customization?Go ahead and check out the unique product range Freitag, and tell us what you think.

Studio469 - Designers point of view

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 6:54 and is filed under Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.