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Since the introduction of Mass Customization (MC) by Davis (1987), the application has kept on expanding. MC has been used in various clothing products including T-shirts, dress shirts, jeans, sports shoes, accessories, etc. When it was first introduced, it had been expected to be the next level of manufacturing and the future of consumption, due to the values of personalized products and the co-design experiential value delivered to customers. In the early studies of MC in the fashion industry, researchers explained how MC can fulfill consumers' needs and wants for utilitarian purposes, uniqueness, self-expressiveness, hedonic desires, and creative achievement (e.g., Merle et al., 2010). Also, by offering online MC programs, companies can sell their customized products directly to consumers, establish effective communication, and increase their online presence (Flynn & Vencat, 2012).
As initially predicted, customization would have been the dominant format of consumption and could have been more permeated in the fashion business. However, MC has not gained as much popularity in the fashion industry as expected. Fashion retailers such as Levi Strauss, Brook Brothers, and Secondly Skin Swimwear, which adopted MC in their physical stores in the early 2000s were not able to sustain and grow MC's market share. Levi Strauss even failed twice when introducing its MC programs. The in-store “Original Spin” program was stopped in 2004 (Piller & Müller, 2004) and their online MC program Levi's “Curve ID” launched in 2010 (Treehouselogic, 2010) didn't get popular or last till now. Even though the concept of MC had been accepted among scholars and business practitioners, and the application of MC has been practiced in the fashion industry for more than two decades, the acceptance among ultimate consumers and the market of MC in the apparel industry has not taken off yet.
Moreover, extant research on consumer acceptance of MC fashion products mainly focuses on the female market (e.g., Cho & Fiorito, 2009). MC practice in the fashion industry also focuses on womenswear more than menswear. For instance, retailers which adopted MC, in the beginning, applied it to womenswear (Treehouselogic, 2010). Compared with menswear, womenswear has to offer more varieties and deeper assortments which make MC operation more complex to accommodate various style combinations demanded by ever-demanding consumers. Also, womenswear normally needs to take more measurement points to offer sizes and silhouettes to meet the needs and wants of customers with different sizes and body shapes, making MC on womenswear even more challenging to manage. Comparatively, menswear has fewer measurement dimensions and relatively fewer varieties to accommodate. For instance, menswear products do not need to fit a curvy body shape and offer too many style options in the collar, lapels, pockets, or sleeve cuffs. Meanwhile, given the increasing fashion sense among male consumers (Berlinger, 2018), they have a growing need for expressing their status and identities through clothing consumption (Kang et al., 2011), and are willing to pay a premium for men's mass-customized apparel (Chen-Yu & Yang, 2020). Therefore, it seems that menswear can be a promising opportunity for fashion retailers to adopt the MC platform and grow their market share. However, as above mentioned, there is a lack of study and understanding of male consumers' acceptance or experience of MC clothing shopping and consumption. Furthermore, most previous studies used traditional research methods (e.g., surveys) and measured participants' perceptions rather than evaluations of real experiences obtained from buying and wearing mass-customized apparel.