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Mass customization creates a variety of added customer value through active customer engagement that results in more personalized products and services, as well as many experience-based benefits for the customer. While mass customization always includes an active input from the customer, collection coordination - a fundamental concept in fashion and textile industries - is by nature a strongly designer-led and/or company-led process. A printed textile, inherently highly aesthetical, is a challenging product for combining customer co-design and designer/company-led collection coordination. Amongst services that offer customized printed textile products, this combination is not currently in use.

In her Master’s thesis Pirita Lauri sets out to combine these two seemingly opposite strategies of mass customization and collection coordination into a digital product that can be used for similar purposes as a traditional coordinated print collection. Lauri’s concept is a vision of a digital “print collection composition” that engages the customer in co-designing the physical end products. It creates added value characteristic to mass customization through customer engagement but ensures aesthetic brand consistency of the end product through designer-led coordination. The concept is strongly based on digitality. Firstly, digital textile printing enables the production of unique made-to-order products. Moreover, Lauri’s concept’s essence lies in the nature of digital content (the image to be printed), which is not bound by any physical limitations, such as requirements set by production methods. The concept describes the digital image as the primary product – and the produced final product is seen as an application of the original digital product.

Lauri’s thesis brings new insight into the field of digital textile printing and participates in the discourse of the potential of digitality in the field of print design. It studies what is needed for a joint approach of mass customization and collection coordination, and proposes one way that this can be done. In the context of printed textiles, a variety of benefits can be created through coordinated customer engagement: joining the two strategies will optimally result in a combination of both the value of mass customization and of collection coordination.

Pirita Lauri’s Master’s thesis, EXTRACT - Concept for a Coordinated Print Collection for Mass Customization (2017) is available at Aaltodoc publication archive.

Pirita Lauri

Master’s Thesis for Master of Arts, 2017

EXTRACT, Concept for a Coordinated Print Collection for Mass Customization

Fashion, Clothing and Textile Design

Department of Design

Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture