The expression Mass Customisation is oxymoron, joining the opposites "Mass Production" and "Customisation", which has lately become fashionable. Mass customisation aims at producing goods and services to individual customer specifications with efficiencies and costs similar to mass production. Some firms in the growing photo gifts market, for example http://FotoInsight.co.uk, apply this strategy, using new technologies and innovative structures to submit mass produced items like key rings and water bottles to an individualisation process, applying user photographs. To achieve costs and delivery times similar to those of mass produced standard items, the production architecture has to be structured in a way that the individualisation takes place at the rear end of the production chain. These firms acquire mass produced components produced benefiting from large economies of scale. As the individualisation can only be applied after an order has been placed, the process is called an "X-to-order" production. The gift items market with its strong seasonal fluctuations towards Christmas and Mother's day requires a particularly flexible production.


Realising own ideas

Services that want to survive the fast changing photo printing market have to produce goods in a way that each customer will find exactly what he or she wants. A growing number of items ranging from the useful to the decorative undergo customisation by application of customer photographs. Users can turn own ideas into realities, which often have an artistic theme or are aesthetic, funny or personal.

Do you have truly innovative photo gift ideas. We are constantly searching for new products for international commercialization.

Regards from Cambridge

Klaas Brumann

http://www.memopix.com
Thursday, July 23, 2009