Escalante
Image: Doozers from the Fraggle Rock press photo pack.
All these people chipping away at Big Product. Passion has no place in Big Product. If you’re passionate about toys, it doesn’t make sense to want to go into the Argos Catalogue. It’s all about logistics and marketing. Sure, there’s genius toy invention there too, and personally I really enjoy logistics and marketing. That what I get a kick out of. But you have to know about it.
But these things… these alternative show us other ways to make things than that, remind us that there are other reasons than money.
These other efforts, all chipping away… they change the economics. They let the passion come through.
And I call it fanufacture.
Fanufacture is the alternative to Big Product, just as blogs and the Web found an alternative to Big Media, and just as we’re currently finding a more transparent approach to Big Politics. And YouTube and MySpace helped find an alternative to the music industry.
Fanufacture and Big Product aren’t rivals. They’re different models. Fanufacture is what happens when you take the Web model and you say, Can I do what I’m passionate about, and for a thousand people and not a million, and automate all the boring stuff so I don’t have to care about it, and still make a profit?
It’s an alternative economics that means there’s passion and more design and more creativity involved.