What is Made4U?
MADE4U is a Collaborative Project within the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), under the FP7-NMP funding scheme that supports research work especially focused on Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). It started on 1st July 2008 and planned to finish at the end of June 2012.
For a large variety of products one strategy that provides end users with innovative added value is achieved via Personalization. Personalization strategies allow manufacturers and marketeers to offer products unique to end-user specifications and build them from the ground up to a given person's needs and desires. In a personalized product situation, end-users typically participate in almost every step of the product provisioning chain, from beginning to end.
The project Made4U aims to research the key business and technology aspects for production and commercialization of highly Personalized Spectacles. This involves two principal components: design and manufacturing of personalized spectacles (lenses and frames) and an innovative business model for bringing them to market.
In the field of 'eyewear', many active businesses (Opticians, RX-Labs, etc) face serious threats from suppliers of low cost commodity products manufactured in and shipped from the Far East. This situation increasingly triggers price wars and places local European market players under heavy commercial pressures. This climate severely threatens the subsistence of many European RX-Labs and Optician businesses and encourages the emergence of distribution channels that value product price over quality.
Nowadays, there exist no proven technologies and methods to achieve 100% personalization of spectacles. However, this is the goal we set-out to achieve with our current project. Our proposed solution spans over the entire value-chain, including the end-users themselves. Based on face and head morphology measurements, together with lens prescription data, the target pair of spectacles will be designed in 'computer aided' fashion. The new design will include personalized (progressive) lens geometry, 3D frame design, and, selected by end-users, the precise lens and frame treatments and decoration. Manufacturing technologies that will be used to manufacture such personalized spectacles are freeform lens cutting and polishing, laser sintering for synthetic material and metal frames, and frame decoration with innovative 3D inkjet printing techniques.