Here's why Manufacturing Village Products are morally good habit-forming products.
First I'd like to give create to Nir Eyal, author of "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products" which caused me to think in terms which are presented below. MV products are developed for two reasons: solving a problem and improving people's lives. Utlilizing the concept they become addictive keeps the products on track to coninuingly being desireable and sellable.
Manufacturing Village (MV) products are all custom products, mostly sold directly to the end user or through an agent expert in customization. The website, designed to accumulate data then transfered to the design software,in this case controlling the knitting machines. And you are right, it is very convenient, accurate, and cost saving.
We'll discuss the machines and software somewhere else as the issue here is how to make sure the customer feels a need to return again and again.
As per Eyal''s book, addictive products have internal and external triggers.
Internal triggers:
- Particularly with women, yet never say men aren't going to be very happy with anything that fits, wearing garments that fit correctly makes them feel good.
- Customizing also means picking colors, patterns, and styles for which the customer can feel proud
- For office workers who need warm clothing to fend off the office low temperatures they can still look business-like
- Our custom apparel creates an aurora of power
- Our custom apparel can last much longer
- Confidence our manufacturing understands their needs
- If they spend less with the competition they feel weak when they wear the inferior product
- They avoid social rejection caused by inferior products
External triggers:
- Your friends and coworkers will notice your appearance
- Customers need to buy sweaters in any case
- You need to be on a dais, or perhaps a golf tournament, where looking good and appropriate means a lot
- Customers may need a special gift and buy a gift certificate
- Our websites work very well and are actually a fun venture for purchasing, way beyond "how fast can we finish" thinking
- Our website displays the custom order whenever asked to and certainly at the end for customer approval via an avatar image
- Competitors won't have the depth of design options and will feel weak
- New designs by the best young designers come out every month
- We are very seasonal in both design and colors, yet every previous design is available too
- We are thier friend
I'm sure you can find many other triggers. Most importantly, anytime a customer thinks they need a new garment we make sure customer friends can only think of us. Then they are hooked/addicted - maybe forever.
Want an example? My brother married a French woman and every year they visited her parents near Paris. His father-in-law used a great tailor and my brother quickly learned to have this tailor make his business suits. Every year my brother would wait until they visited her parents to buy new suits. Hmmm.