Instant Merchandizing

You can now manufacture products on demand, using your own designs, very quickly, easily and cheaply. And it’s only going to get better.

Welcome to the age of the instapreneur. With nothing more than a design, amateurs can manufacture jewelry, robots, T-shirts, furniture — anything. No warehouses. No minimum orders. And no money down. The digital economy isn’t just digital; the same market forces that allowed midlist musicians to make a living distributing their songs online now give amateur clothiers the chance to sell their wares without having to persuade Barney’s buyers to carry them.

Thousands are launching instant businesses. Zazzle, of Redwood City, California, offers a dizzying array of user-designed products from posters to tennis shoes. StyleShake, a custom-clothing site in London, received 25,000 dress designs in its first three months. Spreadshirt, founded in Leipzig, Germany, hosts 500,000 individual T-shirt shops. “These companies significantly lower the threshold for someone to bring anything to market,” says Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. “There’s an industrial-age bias that you need volume to support a factory; but with this, much-more-creative low-volume businesses become viable.”

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