In my recent presentation at the Smart Customization Seminar I made the point that Mass Customization is much bigger in Germany by showing the following image, comparing the number of mass customization companies in Germany vs those I could find in the US:

Note that I even included Burger King in the list of U.S. mass customizers because they advertise as “have it your way”, which is a stretch of the definition of a mass customizer.

Two observations can be made by looking at this list:

a) There are a lot more mass customizers in Germany than in the US!

b) Among the mass customizers in the U.S. are more large companies - like Nike, Dell, and M&Ms

This was underscored by the fact that it seemed that at the conference half of the attendees were German, and that in a benchmark analysis of 500 (as many as are known) mass customizers (RWW), 34% had a .de domain (which is only a portion of all German mass customizers).

So why is mass customization so much bigger in Germany? Here are two potential reasons as to why:

1) In European countries, there’s just less “mass” (production)
“Everything is bigger in America”. The Americans were the first ones to master mass production - think Ford and the T-Model, and a product mass produced for/ in the US has a much larger scale than say in Germany because it serves a market of 300 million, not 80 million people. Hence, consumers in the US are used to big brands and standardization across 50 states. In Europe, that is not the case. What you see in a German supermarket is likely to be very different from say an Italian supermarket. I believe that that probably primes Europeans to be more likely to adopt unique, mass customized products that are not all exactly the same.

2) The funding environment for startups
The drivers of mass customization in Germany are startups. Tiny startups, mostly founded by Generation Y entrepreneurs. The European marketplace of investors and ventures to invest in is much smaller and not as efficient as the one in the US, which requires many of these young entrepreneurs to start a business that they can self-fund with little capital. Mass Customization does that - it requires little investment because you can start with customization on a small scale, and it is cash flow friendly

Finally, it is a fact that some trends just get started outside of the US - like the “green movement” that is bringing quite a European behavior to the United States. Maybe in a similar way, mass customization is now coming to the US? As to why it started out in Germany in the first place - I’m sure there are other reasons but the two mentioned above, and I’m eager to hear your thoughts on it.