Globalization and other inherent factors have created challenges to the North American furniture industry. Imports from low production cost countries did increase greatly over the last five years. At the same time, the U.S. and Canadian furniture manufactures lost market shares. Mass...

While mass customization is usually associated with tangible goods, it is also relevant to less tangible goods, such as software and services. This chapter focuses on WordPress, which is both software and service. To be specific, the chapter presents WordPress as: blogging software; widely...

Although recent research has explored consumers’ reactions towards mass customization (MC) in general, these studies have considered aesthetic and functional MC as one and the same. In the present article, we focus specifically on consumer response to aesthetic MC because there are some unique...

Stefan R. Thallmaier’s investigation enables mass customization businesses to better understand how co-design increases customers’ value perception. He focuses on the increasing proliferation of service channels (online, mobile and in-store) and digital media (toolkits, social media and live...

We study competition between two multi-product firms with distinct production technologies in a market where customers have heterogeneous preferences on a single taste attribute. The mass customizer (MC) has a perfectly flexible production technology, thus can offer any variety within a product...

Companies are being forced to react to the growing individualization of demand. At the same time, cost management remains of paramount importance due to the competitive pressure in global markets. Thus, making enterprises more customer centric efficiently is a top management priority in most...