Mass customisation of wood furniture as a competitive strategy

Abstract

The existence of some segments of the US furniture industry is threatened by imports from offshore countries. Mass Customisation (MC) is discussed as a competitive strategy for US furniture manufacturers to offset their intrinsic production cost disadvantage. Examples from four domestic furniture industry subsectors are used to propose a possible correlation between the level of product customisation (MC) offered and their success in the market. The US kitchen cabinet industry was found to offer the highest level of MC of all subsectors analysed. Interestingly, at the present time, the kitchen cabinet industry is not heavily affected by offshore imports. The wood household furniture industry, on the other hand, was ranked last in regard to MC and was also the one most heavily affected by offshore imported furniture. The study indicates that MC can be used as a successful business strategy for domestic producers competing with low-cost offshore manufacturers.

Intermediaries in the U.S. Hardwood Lumber Market: Comparing and Contrasting Sawmills and Distributors

“…It was assumed that as the industry moved towards customization and just-in-time delivery, orders were becoming smaller and more diverse (Schuler and Buehlmann 2002;Lihra et al 2008). The results were consistent with this assumption (Table 6), with many sawmills and most Table 5, constitute strong evidence of a shift towards more customization in the hardwood lumber industry.…”

“…Some of these challenges are structural and long in the making, such as the ongoing globalization of markets (Schuler and Buehlmann 2002;Buehlmann and Schuler 2009;Luppold and Bumgardner 2011;Hansen et al 2013), the rise of electronic media and the ongoing shift in paper use (Woodall et al 2011;Belz 2012;Dahal et al 2013), and today's customer expectations toward mass customized products (Pine 1999;Schuler and Buehlmann 2002;Lihra et al 2008;2012). Other challenges are more immediate, involving shorter-term events that the industry has to cope with, such as the economic recession that began in 2007 (National Bureau of Economic Research 2010), which has cost the forest products industry more than a million jobs (Woodall et al 2011) while temporarily reducing hardwood lumber demand by more than forty percent (Barford 2013;Johnson and Caldwell 2013;Luppold 2013).…”

“…Because of its importance for business success, research has been conducted on the implementation of supply chain management practices in the wood products industry (Simpson and Wren 1997;Vlosky et al 1998;Buehlmann 2004;D'Amours et al 2004;Espinoza et al 2010a;2010b), while others have explored the improvement of operations management in forest products industries, particularly through the implementation of "just-in-time" and "lean management" practices (Motsenbocker et al 2004;Cumbo et al 2006;Fricke and Buehlmann 2012a). Also, customization as a competitive advantage in the wood products supply chain has been studied by a number of scholars (Kodzi 2006;Kodzi and Gazo 2007;Moreira et al 2007;Walcher et al 2007;Lihra et al 2008). However, less attention has been paid to the ongoing changes to hardwood lumber manufacturers and distributors based on recent industry changes.…”

Customer preferences for customized household furniture

“…Mass customization (Pine, 1993;Davis, 1987;Toffler, 1970), where customers expect products and services to be customized to their needs and expectations, has been identified as a viable strategy to increase domestic profitability for manufacturers with a high cost structure (Huyett and Viguerie, 2005;Grant Thornton LLP, 2006;Wan and Bullard, 2008). Indeed, numerous furniture manufacturers in North America have chosen to offer a higher degree of mass customization as part of their competitive strategy (Lihra et al, 2008).…”

The Role of Organizational Competences in the Evolution of Business Models

“…Mass customization had been identified previous to the survey as a strategy that could potentially re-establish the competitiveness of the sector [28].…”