Last night I was invited to a cool panel at Babson (my alma mater) on mass-customization.  I was invited by a friend Matt Lauzon (who also went to Babson) at Paragon Lake who sponsored the event. 

Scott Kirshner, who is a famous business reporter in Boston, ran the show and there were plenty of great panalists....and folks in the crowd. Zazzle, CafePress and Spreadshirt were thrown out there along with Threadless as major players....and of course t-shirt makers.  VistaPrint's president was there (they do t-shirts now) and i was told a company that I've noticed, ThreadSmith, was there as well.  They primarily provide embroidery online......so, a lot of competitors attending and mentioned throughout the night.

It's good though.  People get weird about competition.  It's like sports at an amateur level....they hate competitors passionately and can't be civil.  At higher levels of sports competition and in some amateur sports like Rugby, people compete FIERCLY ‘on the field’ and then embrace their competitor after the match….smiling and chatting.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out that way in a lot of business engagements I’ve been involved with.  Maybe I need to reach a higher level to interact with competitors civilly.   

Anyway, back to the panel.  We had a nice chat about everyone’s business and common challenges like production scale, process engineering versus manufacturing inventions and (of course) accepting returns for high priced items.  Some of the panelists sold custom shoes, custom jewelry, custom tween outfits, custom dentures and custom printing.  One panelist, Sung Park, had sold his business years ago to Levi’s.  So, there was a lot of apparel represented as well.  We got into a few discussions that transcended mass-customization challenges but with time constraints, a lot of it was story-telling about our different businesses which was very interesting as well.  I think non-competitive meetings between companies that have similar challenges is a great idea and I wish there was a way to encourage it.