CMYK Collection, 2012

Over the course of a broad range of projects, we arrived at a serious question to solve: Can customization and quality be offered standard?

While custom products are ideal for commercial and residential environments, they tend to be a time-sink, costly and just out of reach for the consumer market. That’s something we don’t enjoy, especially since SHIFT has built a community around apartment dwellers and mid-century lovers whose homes are thoughtfully and diligently curated. Being able to offer a product in many colors to suit different environments is ideal. In 2012 we sought to undertake that ideal with an ambitious offering of mass customization called the CMYK Collection.

Beginning as a custom color package offered to burger and fries shop Shake Shack for each of their over 100 locations, we honed these offerings to 26 popular and distinctive colors for every SHIFT product. Offering mass customization at standard prices for a residential environment brought challenges, the primaries being fabrication coordination and also fulfillment complexities.

SHIFTSPACE designed these products to be scalable and efficient in material use, but coating and packing custom colored products added new components to the equation. With our vibrant community of makers, we navigated offering 26 colorways for 4 of our products: the TUCKER Window Box, BOLTON Planters, PARKER Living Wall, and WYLIE Hose Reel. We offered this collection from 2012 to 2016, when we moved onto a standardized color model with low custom color minimums for any buyer. We now offer unexpected choices like the upcoming yellow BEEKMAN Bird Feeder, or the currently available matte black WYLIE Hose Reel, and are expanding our options with each new release.

Tell us which color you’d like to see next from the team at @shiftmakes.

Contact sales@shiftmakes.com to inquire about custom products for retail, residential and hospitality environments.

OriginShift MakesJanuary 27, 2017inox, funston, fairmount, fitzwater, tucker, wylie