Monika Desai has me sold. She’s the Founder of Sole Envie, a company creating custom footwear for women. For those of you following me on Facebook, you know that my favorite date with my wife is an evening at DSW. So I get where Monika is coming from here. Women have relationships with their shoes, I think. So having compatible personalities between the shoe and the wearer make perfect sense to me.
And this gets me thinking about other things that we might want to customize. Sunglasses? Check. Clothes? Yep. Blank-label has that covered (and by the way one of their Massachusetts competitors just received $1.5 million in venture funding). Paragon Lake is doing it with jewelry (quite successfully). What about…cars?
I know, I know. The nay sayers will jump on the “it’s too expensive, it can’t be done” bandwagon. But if you drive a Toyota Sienna minivan you know exactly what I’m talking about; you can never find your ride among the sea of look-alikes in the parking lot. So I think there’s demand, which is the first step here.
And by the way, since GM is (ha ha ha) ‘reinventing’ themselves, why not do something significant instead of just scaling back infrastructure costs and painting the old blue logo green? What about thinking differently about what customers really want?
AfriGadget
Kiva
Wow…hit their homepage and the first thing you see is “Make Your Own Reva.” I love that message! But you know what’s odd? They were designed in California and are manufactured in Bangalore, with widespread distribution in the U.K….but none so far in the U.S.
Anyone out there want to bring one of the world’s smartest, most efficient cars to market here?
Great Idea Kai – a little car company in India has already implemented this concept. See http://www.revaindia.com/myor.htm#
Reva has completely redesigned the concept of a car, with a zero polluting electric car that you can order and customize on the web. they have been in production since 2001 and are now selling in Europe.