**1. Introduction to mass customization**

In today's fashion market, consumer's desire has been changed from purchasing a mass-produced apparel to a more personalized garment with the right fit and preferred design. This growing desire of product personalization demands apparel manufacturers to move away from mass manufacturing to mass customization [1]. Mass customization in the apparel industry refers to producing a personalized style by adopting individual consumer taste, at the right time and at the right cost. In mass manufacturing, high volumes of identical items are produced, yet in mass customization, unique items are produced for individual customer desires [2, 3] for a relatively large market, yet with efficiency comparable to mass manufacturing [4, 5]. Mass customization is also described as a technology-assisted production process where customers are given the opportunity to modify the traditional mass production process to produce their preferred design and fit [6]. Glimore and Pine define this as a collaborative approach where the manufacturer customizes a product based on customer desires identified through a proper dialog [7]. Davis first brought up the concept of mass customization; emphasizing new technologies will facilitate manufacturing customized products in mass basis [8]. As Nayak et al., argue, apparel purchasing is rapidly moving out of the physical domain into the

virtual domain, and technological advancements in the fashion industry such as virtual prototyping, 3-D body scanning, and computer aided design/ manufacturing (CAD/CAM) have already brought mass customization into a reality [2].

Making personalized garments is not entirely a new concept in apparel manufacturing. In pre-industrialized economy, garments were custom-made, catering individual consumer requirements. Measurements were taken from each consumer and the garments were made as 'one-off' pieces with a preferred style and fabric. Consumers used to make their own clothes at home or obtained the service of a tailor to make their garments with their design choice. However, making personalized garments was time-consuming, incurred high unit cost and was not efficient consumption-wise. Furthermore, when getting the service of a tailor, customer had to wait days or weeks to receive the finished garment.

Industrialization made a massive impact to the way garments were made. Production systems were developed to mass produce standard designs with standard sizes at low unit cost. This mass manufacturing strategy facilitated a cost-effective and efficient way of manufacturing garments in a shorter period of time than manufacturing one-off pieces. This led the customers to move away from making personalized garments to the purchase of mass-produced fashion at affordable prices. This eliminated the customer waiting time, as mass-manufactured fashion clothing was ready available to purchase over the counter. However, in the mass-manufacturing process, continuous production run of high volumes made the customization impossible [8], and therefore customers ended up having only few styles in high volumes and different size ranges. Yet, mass-manufactured fashion clothing rapidly captured the consumer market as customized clothing could not compete with the cost and time.
