“Me-Commerce” and CustomMade Thriving in Boston

“Me-commerce,” companies using the Internet to help customers design what they buy, is thriving.  The Boston Herald recently featured three pioneers of “me-commerce” in an article on the “me-commerce” scene in Boston: CustomMade artisan Ted Acworth of Artaic and, naturally, Mike Salguero and Seth Rosen, co-founders of CustomMade.  Read all about it.

“Me-commerce” Thriving in Boston

By Brendan Lynch

"Me Two" - CustomMade Co-founders Seth Rosen and Mike Salguero

Boston has become a Hub of “me-commerce” with several companies using the Internet to help shoppers design the products they buy.

Lexington-based company Gemvara, which recently landed $15 million in venture capital, lets users create custom jewelry. Boston’s Open Runway, a MassChallenge finalist, is developing a customized shop for women’s shoes. Beverly’s Fashion Playtes offers custom fashions for young girls. German T-shirt customizing Web site Spreadshirt keeps an office in Boston, too.

But that doesn’t begin to cover everything you can have tailor-made by a Boston company.

Michael Salguero and Seth Rosen bought woodworking Web site CustomMade.com in 2009. Since then, they’ve turned it into a 29-employee marketplace for any kind of customized product, from furniture to jewelry to its newest category, leather goods.

“We just got our first custom car interior guy, which is cool,” said Salguero, the company’s CEO.

Salguero wants the site to be one-stop shopping for anything custom. Unlike many custom goods sites, CustomMade.com doesn’t have design-generating software to create products. Instead, it offers a platform for customers to connect with product makers — often local ones.

“We say customization is a service, not a product,” Salguero said.

CustomMade is launching a job market where shoppers can post an idea for a custom product and get bids from prospective makers.

CustomMade has taken in about $1.1 million in angel funding, and is looking for another million. The company, which is aiming to turn a profit in early 2012, charges the product makers a subscription fee to offer their services on the site.

Ted Acworth, chief executive of Boston custom tile mosaic maker Artaic, said the company brought in more business in the first quarter than it did all last year. Artaic uses robots to make custom mosaics for hotels, restaurants and other commercial real estate — a market that was wiped out by the Great Recession just as the company got going.

“We sold our first mosaic on Lehman day,” he said.

Since then, the start-up has kept itself lean, which can be tough to do when you need tile-laying robots. The company, with four full-time employees and a few part-time engineers, held back on hiring, cut expenses and raised $550,000 in funding to survive the recession.

“For a while there, we were cleaning our own place,” Acworth said.

A recent thaw in commercial real estate has restaurants, hotels and other projects being planned again, Acworth said. He hopes to hire four full-time manufacturing employees this year, and expects Artaic to be profitable by the end of the year.

“For the first time since starting the company, I think it’s possible,” he said.

The company is developing its second-generation robot, which should be able to compete on costs with mosaics made in China, Acworth said. The company won a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Science Foundation in January to develop the software, and will hear in two weeks whether it will get another to develop the robot.

Recently, Artaic launched a consumer service where you can upload a photo to be translated into a tile mosaic and shipped to your house within three days for $42 per square foot. Acworth said options priced as low as $20 per square foot should be available soon.

Artaic set up shop in the Innovation District in 2007 before the district was named, and Acworth said the area has grown since. He recalled being told on the phone his office was too far away for the U.S. Postal Service to pick up deliveries, while looking out his window at the Fort Point post office. He informed the Innovation District office, and the problem was soon solved.

“I don’t know what happened, but I have a feeling that’s my city government working for me,” he joked.

Cambridge’s Blank Label’s Web site lets users design their own dress shirt for about $55 to $85. The shirts are meant to compete with off-the-rack dress shirt sellers like Brooks Brothers and Banana Republic, according to Blank Label founder Fan Bi.

When the boot-strapped start-up launched in 2009, it aimed the service at younger shoppers looking to create a unique design. But Bi said Blank Label is now targeting an older, more utilitarian shopper who’s looking for the perfect fit — and the change is being reflected in a simpler design and user interface for the site.

“Something might work for a Web native, but someone 10 or 15 years senior might find it a little too much,” Bi said.

Blank Label, which has nine employees split between Cambridge and Shanghai, recently soft-launched a pricier service, called Thread Tradition, for $100 custom shirts with more measurement points, two-ply, 100-thread-count fabric and other features.

The service is aimed at customers used to paying $150 to $200 per dress shirt to the thousands of local tailors all over the country.

“It’s an incredibly fragmented space,” Bi said.

By the end of the year, Blank Label plans to expand into other pieces of clothing, Bi said, but hasn’t decided whether it will be men’s pants, suits, or women’s clothing.

“It was never just about men’s shirts,” he said.

For himself, Bi said he outfits his electronics with custom decorative skins from Canadian Web site Gelaskins.com, and buys his girlfriend chocolates from German Web site Chocri, which lets you design your own chocolate bars.

“I’d probably get more into customization if I wasn’t working under a boot-strapped start-up salary,” he said.

Congratulations to Ted Acworth, Mike, and Seth!