Assume that you have been hired to head operations strategy by an early-stage company, FashionMe, which
just received a venture capital investment of $10 million to build a pilot operation and establish a live market
proof of concept. The company intends to offer individually customized clothing.
The founder’s vision is that, by 2035, each individual customer will upload their measurements, choose fabric
content and weight, choose or modify designs (or upload custom designs), choose colors and accessories (e.g.
buttons, zippers, etc.), and order 100% personalized clothing. Customers could also access designs by
designers (for which they would pay), friends and associates, or their own previously ordered designs, make

modifications, and have them produced for their own current measurements.
100% personalization is possible but prohibitively expensive today. However, FashionMe sees the potential to
(a) apply and (b) integrate technologies in artificial intelligence and robotics to make personalized clothing as
affordable in the future as standard clothing is today. The company cannot wait for all of the technologies to
mature to make this future vision possible, because by then it expects that many competitors will be far ahead
of it. Besides, the company can develop a lot of useful and proprietary learning over the next 15 years by using
existing technologies, workarounds, and data analytics.
Therefore, the company has asked you to prepare the following:
1. The company plans to conduct detailed, individualized, ethnographic research to understand customers’
jobs-to-be-done in personalized fashion. However, until that data is available, you have been asked to outline
your assumptions about the customer jobs-to-be-done by FashionMe.
• Allow ½ to 1 page for this section
• Explain each job-to-be-done and how your operations strategy will achieve it
2. The company recognizes that it cannot serve all the customers it would like to serve immediately. It has to
start with a small, manageable market, maximize its learning, and then expand in phases. Just as Amazon.com
began selling books and evolved far beyond that, the goal is to choose to serve one customer segment that will
enable it to learn and become profitable, then add other customer segments later.
Marketing has suggested the following possible segments for the company to target during its pilot phase of
operations. How do these segments serve the purposes of operations strategy and which would you
recommend? You may also recommend a different target market, but explain why. Remember that you are
developing an operations strategy, not a marketing strategy.
• Outdoor clothing for sustainably minded men (e.g., Patagonia’s “dirtbags” – see Patagonia case study)
• Tall, fashion-conscious men, whom standard sizes (small, medium large, extra large) don’t fit
• Overweight, fashion-conscious women
• Pregnant women