Mass customization will revitalize american manufacturing

A core problem with mass customization (at least of clothing) still exists today - there are so many options available locally without customization, and it's so much easier to purchase, that it creates a very high bar to meet.

I don't think it was the lack of technology to design the jeans. It was the lack of technology that could actually produce them to the measurements that were recorded. At the time, Levi's added some more measurements than just waist and inseam (I forget what they were) In fact, I suspect that if you have some fancy Kinect enabled measurer, it would create lots of new measurements that apparel manufacturers would have a tough time producing, no matter where they were located.

Yes - Levi's "Personal Pair" program (before 1997) was about fit (not about color), which was very difficult to make successful. It attracted older women looking for hard to fit jeans, who were not the target market (which for Levi's was optimally 18-25 year olds)

Levi's then pivoted, and rebranded it to Original Spin. For this article to say that it failed because Levi's "didn't offer color" is an oversimplification. Levi's Original Spin offered many different colors, washes and fits. There was a bar code embedded in the jeans, and a website where you could reorder the jeans online (yes even in 1998).

Even when they pivoted, buying jeans online was not an easy thing to do online (is it much better today??) So this made for a very expensive program, requiring in-store fittings, new technology, high-touch retail, and lots of returns. Even worse, you had to wait a week or two for these jeans.

We even had a laser body scanner at the store in Union Square in SF to take your measurements so someone didn't have to touch you with a tape measure. We had a special factory in Tennessee that made these jeans using a special factory program called Made To Measure (I think that was the name)

Then, because of manufacturing challenges - jeans shrink when you wash them within a certain tolerances - they didn't fit right a lot of the time when you finally received them. So there were a lot of returns. And a customized product that is returned .... is worthless for resale.

Not sure which of these factors have changed in the past 10-15 years (at least for jeans) but mass customization is not necessarily going to change the face of American manufacturing in the way the author suggests. Perhaps there have been manufacturing changes that can make jeans fit better and be constructed in a more sophisticated manner.

I think there's two very big assumptions right there: actually, international air shipping is pretty quick and skilled labor is widely available.