Mass Customisation and the real time corporation in the Clothing Industry

Summary

The fragmentation of demand, which brought about the demise of Mass Production in conjunction with the move to quality markets and the technological advances, unthinkable even a few years ago, will transform our industry in a profound manner.
The signals from the marketplace are, that customers crave for individuality, expressed in a plethora of ways, from financial services to individualised lifestyles and of course customised clothing. Deluged by an infinite variety of clothing ranges, it seems that they would like to take shelter to the `Just for Me` motto.

Diversity does not provide all the answers and marketeers; strategists and futurists argue that “Segments of one” should become the new creed in the Fashion Industry.
Mass Customisation subverts the mass production mindset by searching for individuality among customers and not commonalities, it satisfies “Actual Demand” and not “Forecasted” demand. Many will argue that this is easy to say, but technology can propel mass customisation as the business strategy of the 21st century. What is meant by technology is, a full range of electronic tools, from the ubiquitous Internet to the new powerful CAD systems which can deliver customised clothing at relatively short time spans and above all without incurring significant additional costs to the final customer (at least in theory at present).

It must be noted that it is still early days for mass customisations full deployment in upstream and downstream operations, and worse there is no historic precedent like mass production, which has a history of nearly 100 years

With the present paper the authors will attempt to assess the feasibility of the new business strategy in the value chain. Starting from the retailing environment where CAD terminals installed at retail outlets co-design at the point of sale, the customised garment, thus lock customers to the company’s products, since the relationship becomes very personal, evaluate the new marketing tools, marketers have at their disposal, in other words the rapid feedback loop needed, so that they can quickly adapt the product offering to suit customised wants, thus enhancing the experience. This in correlation with modularity in manufacturing and soft networks of satellite factories, which can deliver, customised clothing quickly to the individual customer

The integrating force behind mass customisations architecture is the corporation’s Intranet which co-ordinates Product Development, Marketing and Manufacturing, following the precepts of Total Quality Management with the demolition of the compartmentalisation of the company’s departments, where information flows unrestricted from artificial barriers and can be transformed into useful knowledge, disseminated to all interested parties.
Knowledge management takes central role here and will also be mentioned, since all the electronic paraphernalia are unable to deliver results without intelligent human intervention.

At the dawn of the new millennium our industry is faced with a new challenge, which can be turned into an ocean of opportunity, if perspicacious companies are willing to tackle the hurdles and embrace mass customisation so to conquer new markets and capture customers.

This paper was first published on the earlier Egytex website. The text above is the summary that was published there.