Wired magazine recently published an article about emerging tech trends. One of the sections was on the “Rise of the Instapreneur.” In the past, if you thought of a cool idea for a business product that required manufacturing, it never really left the idea phase, because honestly, who among us has the energy to build a relationship with a manufacturing plant in China. And then there’s the whole startup cost issue.
Now, we have entered the age of the instapreneur, where…If you think it, you can have it built, cheap and quick. Take a look at the article below and then pay close attention to the links to the sites.
Manufacture and Sell Anything — in Minutes
Jeffrey Wegesin is a furniture maker. His most popular creation is a curvaceous side table, and even though he has sold only two copies of it, he has already turned a profit. He did it without so much as setting foot in a wood shop. And he is not alone. Wegesin is one of 5,000 merchants who have established accounts with Ponoko, a year-old on-demand manufacturing service in New Zealand. Designers upload their blueprints to Ponoko’s servers; when a customer places an order, Ponoko’s laser cutters automatically trim wood and plastic to create the product on the spot. Wegesin, a Web designer, sells the tables through the site for $250, not including shipping. He then pays Ponoko $124 for each table to cover the cost of materials and cutting fees. The $252 he’s brought in so far may not be much, but because he incurred no up-front costs it comes as pure profit.
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.”
These are not just CaféPress-style in-jokes — T-shirts and mugs meant to appeal to a small circle of friends. According to Spreadshirt CEO Jana Eggers, her site saw a 30 percent increase last year in the number of North American shop partners that sold more than 1,000 shirts annually. Even CaféPress has become a bona fide business platform. Jim Gamble, a Bay Area entrepreneur, uses the site to sell 50,000 of his T-shirts and bumper stickers — all emblazoned with conservative political slogans — every year, giving him an income “well into the six figures,” he says.
Large brands are starting to see the appeal of manufacturing-as-a-service, too. Lexus recently used Blurb, an on-demand publisher, to print 1,800 copies of a book promoting the automaker’s green practices. Franchises from Dilbert to the Discovery Channel sell licensed merchandise on CaféPress. Disney has uploaded more than 3,500 of its designs to Zazzle, allowing the company to sell a wider range of products than just the blockbuster Mickey Mouse T-shirts favored by conventional retailers. The service also gives the Disney machine unprecedented agility. “Here, I can see that Hannah Montana is taking off, we can upload a design right into Zazzle’s system, and in a day or two it’s a product,” says Patrick Haley, senior manager of customization for DisneyShopping.com.
As everyone gains the ability to create and sell anything, the long tail will apply to making things as well as to selling them. Amazon.com may be able to offer near-infinite inventory, but only as long as the products exist. On-demand manufacturing could eliminate that constraint, leading to a world where products are always available, nothing ever gets discontinued, and the virtual shelves are always stocked.
