We recently wrote about Authorship > Ownership and the shift we’re seeing (especially at the luxury end of retail and beyond) where customers value the experience of creating a one-of-one product instead of choosing something off-the-shelf. Hermès has taken advantage of this for years. Bugatti recently introduced their Solitaire program where customers can work with designers to build a hypercar to their exacting specifications. Singer is applying similar levels of customization by breathing new life into custom, vintage Porsche commissions.

But this shift toward authorship, along with the latest technologies, begs an interesting question: could authorship at scale be a viable reality, and if so, how can companies achieve it? This week, explore answers to that very question.

Here’s what you’ll find:

In Part 1: Authorship > Ownership, we explored a powerful shift in the luxury market: the move from ownership to authorship. Customers no longer want products that are simply rare. They want products they helped create. Items that carry their fingerprints, their decisions, their imprint.

The result is a growing demand for “one-of-one." These are co-created products that are deeply personal, emotionally resonant, and economically defensible.

But historically, authorship doesn’t scale easily. Personalization, especially at the top of the market, is labor-intensive, expensive, and relationship-driven. How do you deliver that same sense of intimacy, identity, and authorship, not to ten people, but to ten thousand?

Some companies have already answered that without technology. Build-A-Bear scaled authorship with guided choice, not automation. Tools like AI, CRM, and modular manufacturing are increasingly enabling authorship at scale, not just in digital products, but in physical goods people can see, touch, and keep.

In Part 1, we explored authorship as a luxury. High-touch. High-margin. Low-scale. The brands doing it well aren’t chasing volume. They’re monetizing intimacy, creating emotional artifacts through deep collaboration with a handful of customers willing to pay for the privilege.

But what if that model could scale?

Not to millions of identical units, but to thousands of unique ones. We’re talking businesses that trade mass production for meaningful production and that scale intimacy not inventory.

That’s what makes this an innovation challenge: how do you create high-margin, lower-volume ventures that still grow? How do you operationalize authorship, without losing the emotional ties that make it valuable in the first place?

When personalization first entered the mainstream, it looked like choice. Pick your color. Pick your size. Add a monogram. But those options were shallow, a way to feel unique without actually being unique.

Now, customers want more than options. They want authorship. Customers are increasingly valuing “I made this” over “I picked this.” They want the product to carry their vision, not the brand’s.

The problem? Most systems aren't built to support that.

At scale, personalization quickly collapses into templated sameness. The result is products that feel uninspired, experiences that feel generic, and interactions that ignore what the customer has already told you. Sure, it might look like a “choose your own adventure” novel, but inherently you know that the options are already written. The outcomes are finite, in spite of the choices that lead there.

The answer isn’t more options. It’s better systems. Technology plays a supporting role, not as the thing that makes the product, but as the thing that makes authorship possible.

Infrastructure enabling imprint means moving beyond personalization-as-parameter to authorship-as-architecture. These are systems where user input doesn’t just influence the surface, but defines the structure. These systems turn choice into creation. They respond to context. They let the customer shape what the product becomes.

That can happen through technology, or through tight operational design. A few ways infrastructure is already enabling imprint:

In each case, the system flexes around the customer. The output is physical. The logic behind it is personal. And the business model is scalable.

To get there, you have to design differently. Templates are efficient, but they’re rigid. Toolkits are flexible. They let people build.

Some of that happens in software:

The same logic applies to physical goods:

The common thread? Each product gives the user creative control. And that’s what makes the product feel like it belongs to them.

The brands that win won’t just personalize outputs. They’ll enable creation. They’ll trade static UX for composable systems. They’ll invite users into the build process, not as a gimmick, but as the core experience.

AI isn’t valuable because it makes products smart. It’s valuable because it makes systems responsive to individual context, behavior, and input. And that responsiveness is what allows authorship to scale.

Used right, AI doesn’t generate content or accelerate decisions. It builds the conditions for creation.

This isn’t mass customization. It’s mass authorship: systems built to flex, remember, and evolve around the customer. The product is the customer’s because the process is aware of who they are and what they want.

Authorship has traditionally lived at the high end of the market, not because that’s where it belongs, but because that’s where the economics made sense. Custom work took custom labor. And that didn’t scale.

But the landscape has shifted. Modular manufacturing, smarter systems, and AI-enabled responsiveness are making it possible to deliver one-of-one experiences without sacrificing operational viability.

Now, the challenge isn’t exclusivity. It’s architecture.
How do you scale the feeling of authorship without scaling cost?
How do you embed that into the business model itself?

Every customer gets a product shaped by them, but it’s the system, not a human, that absorbs their input and delivers something unique.

Done well, authorship isn’t a luxury layer.
It’s a design principle. And a competitive edge.

The real opportunity isn’t in mass production. It’s in mass intimacy.

The ability to let each customer walk away with something that couldn’t have existed without them.

Not because they clicked the right dropdowns. But because the system was built to listen. To adapt. To remember. To co-create.

This is the challenge for every innovator: How do you design ventures where the most scalable asset is the customer’s own imprint?

That’s the edge. That’s the moat. That’s the brief.

Based on the paper by Franziska Krause et al, 2023

The rise of data-driven design has led to a peculiar consequence: a world where everything looks the same. In The Tyranny of the Default, Franziska Krause et al explores how efficiency, standardization, and algorithms have created a homogenized design landscape. The paper argues that we’re entering an era where the aesthetics, functions, and formats of everyday products are dictated less by imagination and more by optimization. As a result, mass production has lost its sense of soul.

From smartphones and websites to appliances and furniture, visual sameness has become the norm. Rounded corners, neutral palettes, modular layouts—these patterns dominate not because they are inherently better, but because they are safe. They are what worked yesterday, so companies repeat them today. Product design becomes reactive, not visionary. Worse, customization has devolved into shallow tweaks: picking a color, selecting a font, maybe adding a monogram. It’s the illusion of individuality without the substance of authorship.

Krause points out that this sameness isn’t just aesthetic; it’s emotional. Consumers are no longer building relationships with the things they buy. Instead, they are surrounded by objects that are interchangeable, disposable, and stripped of context. What’s lost is the feeling of connection, of participation, of identity. It’s not just that the things we buy are generic. It’s that we’ve been removed from the process of shaping them.

For innovators, this paper is both a warning and an invitation. The default is no longer a neutral starting point. It is a force of flattening. As demand grows for more personal, one-of-one experiences, the opportunity lies in building systems that restore the customer’s creative role. Not personalization through simple parameters, but authorship built into the structure of the product itself.