The kiosk continues in similar vein, with full use of multi-media - cartoon images rushing across the screen, snippets of music and so on - to keep the customer engaged and amused: "When you see the jeans you want: click and drag them to your pocket...well, the one on the screen anyway. And I hope you're wearing clean underwear..." says the kiosk.

Then comes the ultimate personalisation, perhaps the cleverest touch in terms of customising both product and service: "What name do you want on the label on the back of your jeans?" asks the kiosk. The typed-in answer is met with: "What? You're serious? That's what you're going to name your jeans?" It then switches to a TV evangelist-style voice: "Put your hands on the screen! We've got your choices! You can have these jeans, for a price"

The order is sent to the factory in Johnson City, Tennessee, via modem and the customer rushes off to tell his or her friends. Original Spin jeans retail at around $55.

Fashion is fickle. The UK media began reporting last year that the most enduring of fashion items - bluejeans - has become "old people's clothes".
Levi's, the market leader, identifies 15-19 year old males as a core market (purchasing, globally, a staggering 200 million jeans a year). So, reports that teenagers may be turning away from traditional jeans should, by rights, have worried them. But, since the early 1990s, the bluejeans giant has been anticipating just such a turnup and has developed a secret weapon to hang onto its core customers.

Launched in the US, Levi's approach to mass customisation, known as ?Original Spin?, is a targeted programme, using touch-screen technology, that enables customers to design (within limits) and "build" their own jeans on a computer kiosk in a Levi's store.

The customer designs his or her unique jeans, photofit-style (by pasting in the options they want, from choice of button or zip fly to degrees of bagginess to type of material etc.). The computer then asks them the ultimate question, in terms of personalising the customer service experience: "What name would you like on the leather patch at the back of your jeans?" When the customer is happy with the end-product, the details are automatically sent through to the factory as a personal order.

Levi's new strategy is one of customer intimacy, in which the kiosk delivers point of sale promotion, a sales medium, customer service, a front-end ordering system for manufacturing and even input for New Product Development (NPD). All of these functions are integrated and put into the hands of the end-customer, via the kiosk. Dirk De Vos, Levi's European Marketing Director, explains:

"We are traditionally a mass manufacturer, moving stock in large numbers. That's how we have always presented ourselves to consumers: a lot of jeans, large stores, a lot of attention to the branding. We have been extremely successful at this over the past 150 years. But, we did start to feel in the early 90s that our consumer longs to be treated more individually".

"We realised about five years ago that customer intimacy was needed. What we learned from looking closely at our customer relationships was that we sell them a product, they leave our store and at some point they come back and start another conversation, maybe having seen another ad. So, we realised there was more we could do: we could build tools to increase the likelihood of them coming back and continuing the relationship."

For Levi's, as with the car companies who are also chasing the make-to-order Holy Grail, reaching out to build relations with the end-customer can have implications for relations with the customer in the middle - the retailer.

"You must be clear as manufacturers in your distinctions between what you understand by consumer intimacy and what you understand by customer intimacy," remarks De Vos. "In our case, the end-consumer is the kid who is going to wear the jeans; the customer is a retailer. Over the past 150 years we have become very intimate with our retailers, but have lost a lot of the personal touch with consumers. That's where we hope to get better."

At the moment, Levi's customisation outlets are in its own stores. But, since the technology they deploy allows the customer to place an order direct with the factory, other retailers - the people De Vos describes as his traditional customers - must be aware of the possibility of being by-passed completely at some stage in the future.

In the factory
Levi's does not claim to have attained mass customisation. As marketing projects manager Bart De Boever said of the European Levi's plant in Belgium that deals with Personal Pair orders when the company introduced the initiative: "We are still in a test phase, trying to fit a mass customisation process into a mass production facility. Some changes that we need to make for true mass customisation will be in the future, because we can't change the existing mass production facility that radically." So, how did the new approach differ initially from the mass production lines?

"If you look at it operation by operation, the main difference is that the jeans are cut individually," explained De Boever. "All the computers relating to Personal Pair are linked. Orders are sent by modem from the stores overnight to a central server, over a dedicated network. The server then downloads them in the morning to the manufacturing computer, so the machine operative sees them on-screen when he or she arrives in the morning, and only has to press one or two buttons to start the day's customised production".

The first phase of mass customisation involved all the available patterns being loaded on the computer and used to cut panel pieces of cloth - the component parts of the jeans - on an automated cutting table. "We normally cut 120 layers of denim," continued De Boever. "The Personal Pair orders go through the same process. But, instead of 120 pieces that will make 60 identical jeans, the Personal Pair order is cut individually and then works its way through the factory as a batch unit of one".

As for tracking Work In Progress (WIP), the moment the cutting starts, a barcode label generator, which is linked to the cutting table, produces a barcode for that particular pair. This label then moves with the jeans, and is scanned about eight times in all, including after the sewing and finishing phases, to track the order through the factory. "The plan is that customers will be able to monitor progress of their order, eventually via the Web", explained De Boever, echoing the ?customer tracking? sense of involvement pioneered by FedEx.

Leading edge manufacturers are moving inexorably towards the use of real time systems that enable employees, suppliers and (eventually) customers to obtain at-a-glance progress reports. Levi's is headed this way, but De Boever pointed out that this is a development for the future, since the Personal Pair computers transferred information in batches at certain points of the day when they were first introduced,, rather than being permanently on-line.

"Except for cutting, we are pulling mass customised product through a mass production facility, so we are, to some extent, inhibiting the natural flow of work. But, at this test phase, this makes sense because the small numbers involved mean any sub-optimal effect is minimal and is worth it for the learning we take away from the process. At some stage we will probably move to separate facilities. At the moment, we are still refining the process. For example, we are experimenting with mid-way solutions between cutting 120 layers and cutting one layer and looking at how that effects leadtimes in terms of delivery. The next stage will be to go through a step change, based on what we have learnt in this trial phase. For our industry, this really is a revolution," said Boever several months into the test phase.

"We no longer set about finding consumers for a mass-produced product. Now, we use an intimate knowledge of our consumer to find products for him or her".
Dirk De Vos, Levi Strauss


Five benefits of getting closer
to customers with mass customisation
Levi's European Marketing Director, Dirk De Vos, identifies five benefits for manufacturers seeking to develop 'customer intimacy':
Little to no waste in communication, contrary to increasing amounts of waste in traditional media
We are better adapted to individual's wishes and needs, which means less reason for those individuals to switch brands, and more re-purchases. In Canada, a year after their initial purchase, we sent business reply cards to people who had bought personal bluejeans, saying we now had them available in black. We had 13% actual purchases in response to that simple business card
We learn directly from consumers what the new trends and tastes are and that improves our New Product Development (NPD)
The more consumer needs we can respond to in NPD, and the more we invite consumers to participate in NPD, the faster our products will be accepted by the market.
If you respond to individual needs of customers, they respond and tell their friends by becoming brand evangelists. We have found this ourselves with Personal Pair. It's a combination of a very powerful and very cheap form of communication.