Today, CrunchGear wrote a piece about customization and the web. They mentioned Bespokeable:

From the article:

An interesting twist on customized clothing comes from Nicholas Marx of Bespokeable, currently in closed beta: a marketplace for customized products backed by a recommendation engine. Bespokeable is currently focusing on clothing, but they have plans to expand to other customized goods.

“I did specifically set out to build the recommendation engine that powers the personal outfitting service. However, the idea to turn over the production to actual tailors and build a marketplace was indeed the result of an iterative process. The original idea of Bespokeable was actually a clothing line. In a nutshell, we’re zigging, where everyone else is zagging.”

The Bespokeable recommendation engine, according to Marx, will benefit both buyers and sellers:

We take certain data from the buyers such as their hair, eye, & skin color (amongst others) to be used to recommend certain fabrics that will look best with each person. We think that it’s this dedicated focus on personalization that will make the buyers want to use Bespokeable’s market. Bespokeable’s system also gets better for buyers each time they uses it. When someone buy something on Bespokeable, we use that data to recommend future items to that same person as well as to other people who are like that person. This actually acts as an incentive for the buyers to go through Bespokeable, which in turn is an incentive for the sellers to stay on our system…

Certainly there’s a price premium imposed on customized clothes. But the old adage “you get what you pay for” may never have been more appropriate. You can pay a little for mass-produced goods made from cheap materials and assembled as quickly as possible; or you can pay a bit more for a quality garment that’s made from good material by a real human being with an eye for detail. Marx opines about the future of craftsmanship and customization:

It’s also worth noting that it’s independent craftsmen who are best suited to meet the increase in demand for one-off products, not large factories that are designed for mass-production. If you think about it, the clothing industry hasn’t really changed since the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps this “customized micro-production revolution” will be the Second Industrial Revolution.