Chris Anderson, Editor in chief of WIRED magazine, has an incredible knack for spotting trends and communicating them in a way that’s a pleasure to read. He did it in his book 'The Long Tail' and he's done it again in a feature in this month’s US edition of WIRED, in a piece that talks about how manufacturing is moving back home.
A million garage tinkerers
We hope Chris Anderson won’t object to us including excerpts from his excellent feature that sees a future of millions of people running globally successful manufacturing businesses from home.
Here’s a few of the highlights:
“The collective potential of a million garage tinkerers is about to be unleashed on the global markets as ideas go straight into production, no financing or tooling required.”
“Blogger Jason Kottke wrestled with what to call this new class of entrepreneurship, these cottage industries with global reach targeting niche markets of distributed demand. “Boutique” is too pretentious, and “indie” not quite right. He observed that others had suggested “craftsman, artisan, bespoke, cloudless, studio, atelier, long tail, agile, bonsai company, mom and pop, small scale, specialty, anatomic, big heart, GTD business, dojo, haus, temple, coterie, and disco business.” But none seemed to capture the movement.
So he proposed “small batch,” a term most often applied to bourbon. In the spirits world, this implies handcrafted care. But it can broadly refer to businesses focused more on the quality of their products than the size of the market. They’d rather do something they were passionate about than go mass. And these days, when anyone can get access to manufacturing and distribution, that is actually a viable choice.”
The feature also refers to TechShop, a chain of DIY workspaces that’s expanding across America. A market opportunity for someone to launch in the UK? Yes, please!
Chris Anderson’s feature is well worth a read. It shows how we’re moving in to an age when pretty much any kind of business can be run from home – including a manufacturing one.
Read more http://www.enterprisenation.com/detail/A_million_more_home_businesses/3304/1.aspx
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