The NY Times reports that Land’s End is selling a lot of custom-made pants. They’re now about 40% of their pants sales.
Mass customization was one of the big promises of ecommerce’s glory days.
Dell is another company that has used the net to create the necessary volume to make build-to-order a reality. Back in the dot-com bubble, I really liked Chipshot, a company that built golf clubs to order. We may never know if the problem was with the business model or simply bad management, but I’m betting on the latter.
This may signal a return to a more realistic view of ecommerce. We should probably be taking another look at customized news pages as well.