Editors Note: This is a guest post from Danny Wong, co-founder and Marketing Manager of Blank Label, a custom dress shirts startup is part of the growing co-creation movement.

Co-creation is the collaboration between consumers and retailers to create a product that consumers really want, rather than products retailers want to sell you. It’s the next level of consumer-orientation, empowering you to have final say in what you are purchasing.

MIT recently held a conference on mass-customization and co-creation which hosted a slew of CEOs and executives of co-creation companies including Pandora (customized radio / music stations), Zazzle (customized t-shirts and gifts), and Chocri (customized chocolate).

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Chocri’s US CEO, Carmen Magar about co-creation and she had some interesting thoughts to share:

“Co-creation is a lot more common outside of the US, most notably in Germany, which despite having less than a third of the inhabitants has more than three times as many co-creators. Another mass customization – friendly country is Australia. An Australian example of a co-creation company would be Lindgolf, which makes customized golf clubs. Different countries seem to have their respective strengths in the co-creation space – for example, the US has more examples of fashion co-creation, while Germany has much more food customization.”

The US is certainly heavy on fashion co-creators, like FashionPlaytes (customized clothing for girls), LaudiVidni (customized handbags), and my company, Blank Label (customized dress shirts). But we also have a few awesome food co-creators Chocri (after they migrated to the US, from Germany), Me&Goji (customized granola and cereal), and RedMoon Pet Food (could this one be any more obvious?).

Having had several informal conversations with most of these co-creators, these businesses seem to be going in the right direction. I know for a fact that some of these businesses have peaked a million in revenue, and others have secured hundreds of thousands and millions in Venture Capital and Angel funding, so with revenues like that or institutional support from VCs and Angels, co-creation seems to be a promising industry.

There is a lot of value to be had from scaled co-creation:

Consumers finally get a product tailored to them. Not something that the masses will ‘tolerate.’

Low inventory and overhead. Co-creation is increasingly popular because businesses no longer have to carry hundreds of items in inventory, sign up for daunting one year store leases, and hire managers and employees for the physical store location.

Less waste. Back to the idea of no need for a store-front location – that space can be used for other means, maybe even for residential purposes. Businesses also do not have to worry about having inventory that doesn’t sell.

Greater customer reach. With the World Wide Web, businesses are enabled to connect with many prospective customers without being geographically restricted to regions in which the business has a physical presence. We can also thank the big shipping companies too, who allow us to send and receive packages anywhere in the world.

What are your thoughts on co-creation?

img src=”Housing Rights“

In light of the continuing success of Custom Shoe site – Shoes of Prey, I thought I’d take a closer look at another co-creation startup - Blank Label.

Blank Label is a provider of co-created men’s dress shirts.

Not unlike Shoes of Prey, Blank Label has a simple to use shirt designer with a huge array of choice across fabric, cut,  colour and more.

What’s more, the shirts start for as low as $45 and come with a full money back guarantee. Nice.

The site’s executive team is made up of ex-pat Australian Fan Bi and American Danny Wong and the full team is split between Orange County (California), Boston (Massachusetts) and Shanghai (China). Despite this split they’re doing incredibly well to have put together what I feel is an amazing site.

But therein lies a question that’s puzzled me  - why has one site, Shoes of Prey, taken off, while the other, Blank Label, struggled for growth?

Check out the graph below to see what I mean.

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That could very well be at the heart of a philosophical debate about the whole tech startup industry – I mean we all know of startups that have succeeded that oughtn’t have (Twitter succeeding despite its terrible early stage uptime is an example) and others (too many to name) that have struggled despite having what appears to be a great product.

Sure you can put it down to timing, or execution or market – the latter of these may very well be Blank Label’s main issue – perhaps women designing and buying custom shoes online is a better use-case for co-creation than men are designing and buying shirts. I’m not too sure.

What I do think, however, is that as people move away from overt consumerism, the type of buy and throw fashion that can be found on main streets across developed nations (and even in some not so developed), that sites like Blank Label are going to become more and more popular as an alternative.

And so they should be. Then again, and unfortunately for Blank Label, that’s no guarantee of success in this game.