We've been asking a lot of you lately whether Blank Label fits you for work or for play and the response has been amazingly even, i.e. we had two survey results, and one said work, and one said play. Haha, we've received around 120 responses so far from customers and the exciting thing is that people are saying they've ordered for work and they want to order more for play, and ordered for play, and want to order more for work. #CCCR it's happening baby! We're pretty excited because it's the start of our whole 'Make a Dent in the Universe' thing. But to celebrate this confusing mixed feedback, we'd thought we'd try our hands at this 'viral marketing' thing every keeps saying companies should do. 

This is our attempt and we're putting two free Blank Label shirts at stake. And oh so so simple to win.

Design a shirt on our dress shirt application --> just click the button to the right, the one on the side banner, yes. 

You design a dress shirt for work or for play, but decide on which one.

Just use steps i) Fabric and ii) Style.

Copy and paste the entire URL (yes the funny looking one with all the numbers) onto our Facebook Page 

Title it 'Work Shirt of April', or 'Casual Shirt of April'

*Because of the way our Dress Shirt App is set up, your design won't properly show up on the Facebook wall, which will mean that people are just going to have to see your magic in the full glory of the Dress Shirt App itself!

Rules

1 point for a 'Like'

2 points for a 'Comment'

Two Winners, Most Points for Work Dress Shirt, Most Points for Play Dress Shirt

Competition Runs for the 30 Days of April

Someone recently asked us on our formspring.me page what our favorite YouTube channel was, and it made us think that maybe we should share some of our recent favorited YouTube content. To mix it up, we've included something more useful (about us), something funny (for all guys) and something different (mainly for all the guys who email us about this). As we always say, Please enjoy ;)

Building a brand around Co-Creation is more than just about allowing users to come onto the site and design their own dress shirts. Co-creation is a business philosophy.

Part of the passion that drives us everyday is we don't think most big companies give a shit. Period. We just don't think they care. Yes they have design teams paying hundreds of thousands traveling the globe for inspiration, going to the fashion shows to party and drink *cough* I mean get inspired, to tell you what you should wear this spring. To us, that's f***ing pretentious and a waste of your money. We really see the development of Blank Label, every component of it, from the dress shirts that we produce, to the site features we have, as something to be co-created.

Courtesy of facecocreation

We actively, but not even actively enough, seek feedback from customers who've gone through the entire design process and believed in us enough to purchase something from us. You trusted us, and that's massive. I, as the founder of the company, will pick up the phone and speak with customers and chat about their experience. I massively appreciate the feedback, and they like speaking with the founder and knowing that we care about what they think. Now compare that with experiences you've had in retail recently. 

I'm going to be honest, we're sometimes pretty lousy at guessing what people want in a co-created dress shirt, or what they think should be the ideal customer experience. But guessing is foolish, ah so so foolish. Especially when it's just so much easier to ask. We were thinking about adding a widget to our site that allowed you to create a unique page that you could display your dress shirt design on, but people told us the idea sucked (but in nicer words).

"Really, don't you think it'd be cool to design something, name it and then show it off to others?" 

"NO! But more fabric options would be nice, and the sizing is still a little confusing. You've been talking about making changes to that for a while, but it's not quite there yet."

In this new age where everyone has a voice, it's more just listening to customers, which most companies already fail at, but it's about actively asking them and engaging with them throughout your development as a company. Co-creation for us is about Designed By You, Stitched By Us, but it's also deeply ingrained into our business philosophy. Blank Label is Y(our) Company.

P.S. We now have a new hub at www.formspring.me/blanklabel where you can ask us any question you want that will get shared with our community.

Here on the Co-creation blog, we talk a lot about awesome #CCCR companies like SoleEnvie, Me&Goji and Gemvara, and we discuss the great benefits of co-creation and mass-customization. But now I’d like to look at what problem the #CCCR is fighting. And with most revolutions, yes, it's the establishment. This time in the form of mass-production.

For a long time, mass-production has been seen as the end-all efficient system of production because of the economies of scale. You make one specific product and you make it really well. You standardize its production process, its inputs, and you negotiate lower raw costs because you buy the things you need to make it all in bulk. Also, since you know how much you want to produce, you multiply the quantity of product you’re looking to create by the quantity of ingredients per product, and there, you can buy enough raw materials to supply the 100,000 widgets you were hoping to make. You don’t overbuy or underbuy the amount of materials you need to mass-produce the widgets. Since your production process was streamlined (saving time and money) and your raw costs were cut down because of your scaled bargaining power, you can offer your product at a lower price to be more accessible to consumers.

Everyone wins. Ding! They get the same exact product, every time, at a low price. Ding Ding! There are no inconsistencies with the product either, because the production process is the same for the 10,000 widgets and because the ratio of inputs stays the same as well. Ding Ding Ding Ding!

But does everyone really win? Ding Ding? Is mass-production truly efficient? Ding ...

Find more photos like these by perseverando

The inefficiencies of mass-production include:

1.     Oversupplying (creating waste) or Undersupplying (not meeting market demand) - these things can happen because retailers can never properly predict demand.

Retailers factor the cost of goods that will go unsold into their pricing. So if on average, they don’t sell 5% of their product every season, the cost of the unsold 5% is averaged out across the 95% they expect to sell and added to the prices of those products. A lot of times too, the remaining 5% will be thrown away, so as to not devalue brand equity by offering the surplus product at a deep discount to get them off-the-shelves and to ‘cut their losses.’

2.      Lack of Individuality - creating 10,000 copies of the same product

No one wants to have the same thing the next person has. Don’t you hate walking down the street with that cool t-shirt you’re wearing, only to see some not-so-cool guy wearing the same exact thing? Your boxed in like everyone.

Courtesy of Berle Mu

3.      Creating product no one wants – maybe no one wants that new Furby you’ve created

That’s just wasteful to push a product that consumers don’t consume. First of all, you’ve wasted time and money creating this thing, and now you’ve wasted a lot of raw materials because they weren’t put to very good use since no one uses your products.       

4.      Creating product that consumers like, but then there's something wrong with it, or something missing - we all have individual tastes and mass-produced product can't fully satisfy every buyer

Mass-produced product can’t satisfy everyone. Didn’t you ever walk into a store and see that jacket you really wanted, but noticed that it had a rip in it due to some careless shopper? Or that it should have had military shoulder straps because it would have had an awesome ‘utility’ look?

Mass-production was great in the 20^th century when Mr. Ford invented the assembly line. But co-creation is the wave of the future because it can resolve mass-production’s inefficiencies.

This article was crafted by Lead Evangelist, Danny Wong, believing no one should have to 'settle' for a mass-produced dress shirt when they can easily design their own custom men's dress shirts.

Someone recently sent me this video of me doing a Blank Label pitch about our custom men's dress shirts in front of a Boston 'Innovation Night' audience. Its just after our launch back in November last year, and it was interesting to think back even just a few months ago, and remember what I thought about all of this ... Probably for out real die-hard Co-Creation Custom Revolutionaries out there, if you're out there ... *tumble weed* ... or for our competitors. Ha!

This was a nice contrast to a video of Danny, our Chief Evangelist, and the baby of the team (part of the Old and New title I was going for), taken by another Co-Creation Custom Revolutionary, Carmen Magar of Create My Chocolate and the blog Mass Customization.

There is something about Threadless just incredibly cool. Everything from the way they silk-screen their tees, to the brilliance of their designer community, the outrageousness of the employees and slickness of their site; I'm willing to say, that they're one of our biggest inspirations for creating co-created custom men's dress shirts. We already highlighted them as one of the leaders in what Wired Magazine branded as The Next Revolution in From Stitching Shirts to Assembling Cards, the Next Revolution. But kudos where kudos is deserved, they recently partnered up with Griffin Technology, a leader in iPod, iPhone and iPad accessories, to offer a new platform for designers to collaborate on, and that's the iPhone cover. You can check out a couple of examples below, but as you can probably imagine, with such a massive fan base, these are selling out quick. But beware, similar to wearing identical tie and cuff link sets, matching tee and iPhone is still probably a little uncool ... so don't ruin it for everyone else!

This is a really interesting 4-min vid on the collaboration between Threadless and Griffin, what their respective teams think about it, and just more coolness ...

Threadless + Griffin = one awesome case! from Threadless.com on Vimeo.

So I was with our tailors yesterday, hanging out, chatting about the Olympics, sharing some dumplings, the usual, when they showed they stopped me mid-sentence and told me they had some new fabrics to show me for our custom men's dress shirts. Now these are hardly hi-res, but they're a start at a look at some new dress shirt fabrics we might offer in the next month or so. We're probably thinking about maybe 5, possibly 10, so have your vote, tell us in the comments, which ones you'd like to see.

 Number 1.

 Number 2.

 Number 3.

 Number 4.

 Number 5.

 Number 6.

 Number 7.

 Number 8.

 Number 9.

 Number 10.

 Number 11.

 Number 12.

They say that Venture Capitalists are some of the most innovative people, they're supposed to understand what's just around the cusp before everyone else. Now this blog post isn't supposed to agree or debate the 'innovativeness' of the venture investment community. This blog post is to give brief highlight to the co-creation, open innovation and mass-customization companies that are getting attention and money, and here's to hoping that the VCs know what they're doing, are innovative or at least supporting the innovation, and the #CCCR momentum continues.

Spreadshirt

A real inspiration to us is Spreadshirt. What started a few years ago by Lukasz Gadowski, a Polish immigrant, in Germany as a site for people to upload designs of their own tee shirts, as now become a multi-tiered online platform for apparel merchandising that allows individuals and businesses to create their own online shops for free and sell customized products.

Much like blogging has allowed anyone passionate and creative to share a voice, Spreadshirt has empowered anyone with an internet connection and a knack for design and logo aesthetics to start a micro-business. Spreadshirt handles everything from production, shipping, payment processing, customer service and other merchandising tools.

Spreadshirt raised a second round of investment February 2009 totally $12.7m

Gemvara (formerly Paragon Lake)

Started out of Babson College dorm rooms in outer Boston by Matt Lauzon and Jason Reuben, Gemvara is a leading online jewelry destination that gives shoppers the ultimate custom jewelry experience. Feeling a little insecure about our own design-it-yourself application, Gemvara really leads the way with gazillion ways to be completely unique.

Under its former alias, Paragon Lake raised $5.8m in Series A funding back in July 2008.

Local Motors

With the world’s largest community of car designers and engineers embracing open collaboration and developing innovative cars, you can’t help but believe Local Motor’s mission to lead  the next generation of automotive manufacturing, design, and technology in order to revolutionize the industry with game-changing efficient vehicles and an unprecedented standard of customer service. It’s core values are a creating must-have products, community, profit, environment, safety, seductive simplicity, and customer first. And if that sounds like a mouthful, John Rogers is a beast and we have every confidence that he is going to change how cars are built.

In the spirit of open collaboration, Local Motors has raised about $4million from 30 different investors.

Etsy

One of my personal heroes is Etsy CEO and Co-Founder, Robert Kalin. The guy’s just so freakin’ cool, and his company’s doing $100m in rev. A little bit of a man-crush, yes. Etsy’s a website that allows users to buy and sell handmade products, anything from accessories, clothing, art, etc. It’s user-design centric, with a really slick Flash interface and intuitively cool widgets.

After raising an angel round from the founders of Flickr, they've raised $32m over three rounds of venture funding.

You should check out this on-the-spot interview with Robert Kalin.

You might also notice that the respective founders of these companies are all young rebels, and if you go to our Team page, you might notice why we like that ;)

Co-create your custom men's dress shirts now and join the movement.