Brands Get DIY and Hand-Made

Made-to-order is a booming business category for two reasons: the economy, and the fact that customized goods, although more expensive than their mass-produced counterparts, pay for the difference with the feel-good factor.

The range of goods is as broad as the day is long, including $1,250 custom bedding from Create-a-Mattress, above, a start-up in Needham, Mass., founded by former Dial-A-Mattress executive Evan Saks.

Brands are catering to customers' desires for pretty much any kind of product you can imagine: one-of-a-kind pet foods, bikes, chocolate bars, toilet paper.... The list is endless, but is there money to be made?

For startups, the costs are comparatively low as these custom businesses operate solely online with no physical plant overhead. Nor do they stockpile items, producing on-demand only. "We don't have to make anything in advance," Nick LaCava, co-founder of Chocomize, a design-your-own-chocolate-bar business, tells the Wall Street Journal (don't miss its slideshow).

Custom products are particularly attractive to millennials, having grown up with personalized tech such as ring tones and avatars. "It's almost a base expectation that a product should be tailored to one's personality," adds RepublicBike founder, Avery Pack.

The two-year-old Dania Beach, Fla. company makes bikes in three styles, with 10 color choices for saddles, grips and tires, priced between $400-$500. "Nothing needs to match. Your front rim can be baby blue and your rear rim a crazy green," adds Pack.

With a tip of the hat to Etsy, which in 2005 changed the online artisan game, trumping the only existing platform at the time (eBay), there’s now a robust market for the DIY and hand-made goods market. Mashable's top ten list includes Etsy, 1000 Markets, Foodzie, and Supermarket as examples.

Etsy, in particular, is taking off: former Google exec Adam Freed is the new COO and the crafts e-commerce behemoth just raised a next round of venture funding - $20 million.

According to Jon Chair, a partner at early-stage VC firm Dace Ventures, "We used to get a proposal from one new venture focused on customization out of thousands a year. Now we see several per month. That's a major shift." Dace just invested in Panraven, a three-year-old custom photo-scrapbooking business.

Of course, it's not just niche brands — thanks to the Web, bigger categories are in the DIY game, too, such as athletic shoe brands and cars. The bigger question: are customers willing to pay more for customized, vs. off-the-shelf and mass-produced, brands?

(For more on customization, check out this white paper by Ted Mininni)