Co-design Communities Online: Turning Public Creativity into Wearable and Sellable Fashions

This observational research investigates co-design community features and interactions between the company and co-designers, as well as among co-designers on two websites (Zazzle and Threadless). Both websites invite their consumers to co-design their product offerings and provide a platform for co-designers to interact. Interactions and communications among consumer co-designers mark a critical departure from early co-design practices that relied on a one-to-one relationship between the customer and the mass customizer. As a result of this research, a three-phased framework for apparel mass customization is developed, along with three corresponding models that depict and predict the multi-dimensional interactions between the mass customizer and consumer co-designers, and among consumer co-designers.