Outside Innovation

Our Review of Zazzle.com: How Easy Is It to Create and Sell Customized Products?

Zazzle.com is amazing. You should know about it, if you don’t. It’s a privately-held business, headquartered in California that was founded and is still run by a father and his two sons. Their secret sauce: print brilliant multi-color images on just about any surface quickly and professionally and ship that personalized, customized product overnight. Zazzle.com is a true customer ecosystem. It attracts 8 million visitors per day; 3.5 million/day to its US site and the rest to 17 country or region-localized websites. The site features 80 million unique product designs in 50 product categories, with 150,000 new products added daily. These products are produced and shipped, usually within 24 hours, to over 224 countries. There are over 1 million sellers on Zazzle. These are people who are making a business by selling their own creations.

This week, Ronni Marshak takes us on a tour of how easy (or not) it is to create your own custom products and create a store in which to sell them on Zazzle.com.

Being Creative on Zazzle.com
How Easy Is It to Create (and Sell) Your Own Customized Products?
By Ronni T. Marshak, EVP & Sr. Consultant/Analyst, Patricia Seybold Group, January 17, 2013

Google App Inventor: Right Idea; Missing “Do What I Do” Feature

I was excited to hear about the advent of Google App Inventor for Android—an environment that makes it easy for non-programmers to create apps for their mobile phones. I'm still waiting to get my hands on it since it's being rolled out for educators and students only.

Since the mid-1970s I've been a fan of application development tools that end-users can use to roll their own applications. I have long contended that if you really want your application environment to take off, you need to empower end-users to invent and create their own applications. I learned this from watching the evolution of early word processing systems in the mid-70s. CPT was one of the first companies to make it easy for users to automate processes by storing a complicated series of keystrokes, recording these as macros, and then letting the user abstract that recorded code into reusable chunks of logic with if/then logic.

Wang Labs and Digital Equipment also implemented similar capabilities in their word processing systems. Power users—the smart people (mostly women) who produced most of the documents for their companies at that time—quickly developed lots of time-saving and ingenious programs that both automated and transformed their work.

Google App Inventor uses a different approach—a set of graphical building blocks, based on the evolution of the work of Seymour Papert's Logo language at MIT. [Another evolution of Papert's work led to the LEGO Mindstorms' NXT User Interface by National Instruments for a child-friendly and scientist-friendly version of LabView—a sophisticated parallel programming environment designed for sensing and controlling inputs and outputs—which I describe in this chapter of Outside Innovation.]

Here's the KittyPurr video demo of App Inventor for Android:

I am bullish about the Android App Inventor—not because I think that it will generate tens of thousands of killer apps that will give the iPhone app ecosystem a run for their money, but because I like the end-user empowerment that it unleashes. What I wish is that someone would also create a "do what I do" keystroke capture/macro creator for Android (and iPhone) apps that you could then edit and refine using either this building block approach and/or a simple scripting language, as with the word processors of yore.

Here's a video from Google's visiting professors who apparently contributed to the genesis of App Inventor for Android with a bit more background on their thinking.

Crowdsourcing Condom Advertising—Will This Work?

You may have noticed this article in the New York Times, A Hip-Hop Contest to Promote a Brand. Trojan, the manufacturers of the Magnum brand of condoms, has grown revenues and marketshare for the Magnum brand, not through traditional advertisements, but through word of mouth: mentions in Hip-Hop music lyrics by artists such as Ludacris, Kid Rock, Lil Wayne, and Eminem. The NYT article doesn't make it clear whether the Magnum product manager engaged in product placement activities or simply fanned the flames. I suspect there may be some mutual promotion underway. ("I'll mention your product, you tell the world about my song.")

Now Magnum is building on the Hip-Hop momentum by launching a "Live Large" marketing campaign in the form of a contest soliciting more hip hop or R&B songs and lyrics from anyone, not just professional musicians.

You can go to the contest site, MagnumLiveLarge.com, download music tracks to use and/or use your own, and submit your own songs and lyrics about "living large." Fans can vote on the submissions and, of course, spread them around virally. The winner will receive a $5,000 prize and a trip to a hip-hop festival in mid-June in Atlanta, where they’ll be congratulated by Ludacris.

National Semiconductor’s New WEBENCH® Visualizer Raises the Bar

I've always admired Phil Gibson's work and have often pointed to many of his accomplishments as best practices. This week, he did it again! On November 9, 2009, he unveiled the most sophisticated, yet simple to use Web dashboard that I have ever seen to help customers make buying decisions.

By turning a virtual knob to optimize for power efficiency, small footprint, and/or cost of a total bill of materials, design engineers can instantly generate and evaluate the most appropriate options among billions of power supply circuit designs. By turning the dial, or selecting different parameters or filters, engineers can visually navigate a bubble diagram depicting the choices that meet their requirements. They can zero in on a group of designs to compare. Or, by shifting their perspective or their parameters, instantly generate a new set of options. Designers can start from one point in space (input source, output voltage, and output current) and visually shape and navigate to their preferred solution. Phil calls it “designing at warp speed” because you feel as if you're in a spaceship jumping from one set of bubbles to another. The size of each bubble is its cost. The bubbles are arrayed along dimensions of footprint size, number of components, and efficient heat dissipation.

 

Phil Gibson is the VP of Technical Sales Tools at National Semiconductor. He is also in charge of National's award-winning Web site. Phil always amazes me with the robustness and completeness of the free Web-based tools he provides to prospects, customers, and partners.  

Other e-business leaders may be happy when their customers can use their Web sites to quickly find and buy products. Phil isn't happy unless customers can use his Web site and tools to design, specify, simulate, and test complete circuitry, which they can then purchase either as a complete priced-out Bill of Materials from dozens of partners or purchase an evaluation board and components that are shipped overnight.

How to Revolutionize Your Industry

If your business model is under siege, what should you do? That’s the question that Vikram Savkar asked himself a couple of years ago. At the time, he worked for a publisher of high-priced textbooks. He decided that among the reasons the textbook publishing market is broken are:

• Customers don’t choose what to buy -- the students who buy the books don’t get to choose which books to buy (their professors assign them).
  
• There’s no feedback mechanism for students to react to the material in the textbooks, nor to interact with the people who write them.
  
• There are no real alternatives to traditional textbooks, so publishers can’t tell what their customers would prefer.

So, when he got the opportunity to reinvent what he perceived to be a broken market, Vikram seized the opportunity. This week, we present the a case study on Scitable—the project that Vikram and his team at Nature Publishing Group’s new Nature Education division have launched. You’ll see that they are attempting to create an alternative to science textbooks and to come up with an alternative business model.

As I explored Scitable and learned how students and professors are using it, I noticed that a lot of the third-world students who are flocking to Scitable would probably not have bought $150 textbooks on genetics. So Scitable isn’t replacing something they would have bought. It’s replacing something they wouldn’t have bought. It’s providing a new value proposition to a new market. 

Disruptive Innovation: Nature’s Scitable Replaces Life Sciences Textbooks

In October 2008, Nature Publishing Group's new Education Division quietly launched the Beta of a revolutionary idea: Replace expensive textbooks with a free collaborative learning space for science. Scitable.com went live in January, 2009 and has quickly become a magnet for serious students of genetics (the first field that Nature is addressing).

Now, in the Fall of 2009, Scitable.com is alive and well. Students and faculty from all over the world are actively using Scitable's resources to teach and learn about genetics.

What can you do on Scitable?

• Explore a topic room in subjects like evolutionary genetics, gene inheritance and transmission, genes and disease, genomics, and several others.

• Follow a Learning Path on topics like the human genome project, cancer, or types of genetic diseases.

• Join or create a public or private class or study group.

• Read well-written short articles that introduce concepts in enough depth to get you oriented.

• Read the most important research on each topic.

• "Ask the Experts" at Nature Education just about any question you have about genetics or about the material you're reading.

• Design a course using any of the free materials.

  

I interviewed, Vikram Savkar, the Publishing Director at Nature Education,who led the innovation team at Nature to create and launch Scitable. I learned how he and his team approached and carried out an intrapreneurial project designed to revolutionize the textbook publishing industry. I also learned a lot about how to develop a next gen Web-based product.

I look forward to following this project and to bringing you background and updates as Nature's burgeoning Education group throws down its gauntlet at the science textbook publishing industry and introduces a new customer-friendlier business model.

People Learn from People

Another pattern I noticed among our Visionaries was the various ways they connect people to people in the online world. As one participant said, “People don’t learn from information; they learn from people.”

On Visionaries’ Web sites, you notice that students can interact with one another, find experts, interact with their coaches and teachers. Customers can connect with other customers with similar issues as well as with their sales team. Consumers can glean tips and tricks from one another. Customers can see a product that someone else has customized and reuse those patterns to create their own customized product. Seekers can look at a graphical network of experts in a particular field and find the people whose expertise has been frequently published or patented. They can see who else is connected to those experts.

Most visionaries seem to feel that part of their job is to connect their customers with one another so they can learn from one another and share experiences. They also believe in connecting customers with internal experts and resources. They recognize that customers’ needs bridge organizational silos and pull employees and subject matter experts together across those silos. They realize that referrals, social networking, and viral marketing are the engines that drive customer acquisition.

Spreadshirt: Making It Easy to Be Your Own Brand

Like sneakers, custom-designed and printed T-shirts are a huge category in mass-customized products. Spreadshirt is one of the most mature companies in this space. It was founded in Leipzig in 2002 by Lukasz Gadowski and Matthias Spiess, and quickly became a European market leader in personalized clothing. The original idea wasn't a direct-to-consumer play, but an online shop partner that would empower small retailers to create and sell their own branded goods. With the combination of a well-designed Web infrastructure and custom manufacturing expertise, the firm grew from a prototype to a multimillion Euro global company.

CNN Partners with Spreadshirt

 

Make a Statement

CNN partnered with Spreadshirt to enable customers to make T-Shirts out of CNN headlines.

Refocus on Shirts and My Brand

Jana Eggers is now the CEO of this company, which has offices in Leipzig and Boston. "We're a creative, personalized apparel company. We have millions of direct customers and over 300,000 shop partners."

Jana told the story of the refocusing of Spreadshirt. "About a year ago, we refocused. We were producing a lot of custom merchandise: puzzles, clocks, lanyards, mugs, and, of course shirts. We went through a transition from "you think it, we'll print it" to a laser focus on making it about them—the customers and the products that carry the most emotional impact for them."

They did a lot of soul searching and research. "We asked our employees first; then we went to our customers." They asked customers: "What made it "your own label?" Jana explained. What they discovered is that wearable apparel packed a lot more impact than any other customizable object. And that telling a story or making a statement about yourself is the key emotional driver. Jana said that the phrase that really summed up the customer research for her was: "I wear my shirt every time it's clean." This was the big epiphany. "Shirts are very personal to them. People comment on them. They wear them proudly. We also learned that the process of creation is a really important part of the perceived value of the experience. Many customers commented that they wanted to spend more time in creating their customized shirts; not less."

Mars Direct: Personalizing Candy & Expressions

Personalized Expressions

Dan Michael, the R&D Director of Mars Direct, told "the story of how and why a personalized chocolate business was started and grown within a mass market snack food company." He briefly described the evolution of Mars Direct which currently sells, manufactures, and delivers personalized M&Ms and Dove Chocolates. "We're not a candy company; we're a personalized expressions company," Dan emphasized. "We make special moments more magical. The giver makes meaningful moments more magical through personalization." Personalized M&Ms are used at birthdays, weddings, company bashes and sporting events. "My Dove" chocolate bars, with specially printed messages on the foil wrap, have been used to propose marriage as well as to celebrate events.

My M&M's

Create Your Personalized M&Ms

For each order, you select from among 22 colors and create the verbiage you'd like. Add imagery, including photos.

My M&Ms. I have personal experience with My M&Ms®. I've ordered them for my grandkids' birthdays. They're always a big hit. I learned about them from an online ad at myrecipes.com. It's quick and easy to go to the mymms.com site and use the online tools to select your colors, type in your message(s), and select your packaging. As of June, 2008, you can also upload an image or a logo and have it printed (in black) on a colored M&M.

One of the things the My M&M team has learned is that customers not only want to personalize their candy to tell a story or to commemorate an event. They also want to customize the packaging they select. Depending on the event, customers may choose to have the personalized candy delivered in bulk (so they can pour it into bowls), or wrapped in cellophane bags, or delivered in boxes or tins. Dan reports that the most popular options are currently the 7 ounce cellophane wrapped bundles and the bulk delivery.

My Dove. The customization of M&Ms packaging gave the Mars Direct team the idea to use custom packaging as the personalization mechanism for other snacks—ones that don't lend themselves to printing on the candy. The personalized expressions that customers create for My Dove candy bars are printed on the foil paper used to wrap the candy.

When you visit the Mydovechocolate.com site, you'll discover a wealth of seductive personalization and customization options. You can select the type font, create multiple messages, and select the color of foil wrapping. You can select among a wide variety of gift boxes, with different types of chocolates and different packaging options, e.g., ribbon colors, and so on.

American Power Conversion: Profiting from Smart Customization

Lars Hvam and Niels Henrik Mortenson head up the Centre for Product Modeling at the Technical University of Denmark's Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Management. At the MIT Smart Customization Seminar, they presented several compelling case studies of smart customization in action among their clients. These are all major B2B manufacturers who have been applying the principles of smart customization and modular design of product lines and business processes for several years.

These cases are covered in more detail in their recently published book, Product Customization.¹ One of the most detailed accounts that Lars and Niels presented included highlights from American Power Conversion.

The Importance of a Product Variant Master

Niels Henrik Mortensen and Lars Hvam described how American Power Conversion created a streamlined modular product line by mapping out the current product assortment and processes and then simplifying them.

Dramatic Reduction in Lead Times by Moving from Engineering to Configuration

American Power Conversion (APC) is a multibillion dollar provider of complete power management systems for data centers, access providers, business networks, and home/small office.

It used to take APC 18 months to design, configure, and deliver the power management infrastructure for a data center for on-site assembly. Today, the company's 35,000 customers receive (or generate) a quote in less than an hour. The lead time for delivery of a complete infrastructure system for a large data center has been reduced from 400 days to 16 days! Since the systems arrive pre-assembled, on-site installation and integration has also been dramatically reduced.

Customers and technical consultants no longer engineer these complex solutions; they configure them. American Power Conversion's configuration and ordering systems are used by more than 10,000 sales engineers and dealers worldwide as well as by the majority of APC's customers.

APC manufactures standard modules in the Far East (power supply, air conditioning, cabling). All of these modules are mass produced. "The manufacturing is planned and executed based on the product and manufacturing specifications generated in the configuration systems," they explained. Most systems are then pre-assembled in one of APC's 15 assembly distribution centers around the world.

*Endnote*
1) Lars Hvam, Niels Henrik Mortensen, Jesper Riis. Product Customization. Springer, 2008

*Endnote*