Environmental Impacts of Mass Customization
Team
Ryan Chin and Daniel Smithwick
Project Brief
We argue that mass customization strategies generate more sustainable products at lower cost and increased value. This claim is founded on research conducted on the product life-cycles of mass customized products vs. mass produced products.
One key finding of the initial research reveals that the most significant source of potential energy savings comes from the customer experience processes – product acquisition, product use, and consumer decision-making. This research shows that mass customization practices often out-perform mass production practices and lead to dramatic energy and material savings, which was revealed in our case study of men's dress shirts.
“Environmental Impacts of Utilizing Mass Customization,” was published in 2009 and documented evidence for sustainability benefits of mass customized products over their mass-produced counter parts. This research shows surprising and non-intuitive energy, material, and time-savings benefits of mass customization practices by examining product life-cycles, including manufacturing, distribution, and customer experience of mass produced and mass customized products.
The 2009 study focused on the men’s dress shirt industry by comparing energy and material use of standard off-the-rack or mass produced (MP) men’s dress shirts with mass customized (MC) men’s dress shirts. Through interviews with manufacturers and retailers of custom and standard shirts, an analytical framework was developed for understanding manufacturing, distribution and customer experience processes. In addition to these interviews, the customer’s acquisition process was studied through a step-by-step analysis of total time, travel, energy spent, and CO2 emitted.
