Threadless

Threadless 
SiYeun Hwang
4/29/2012

Threadless is a Chicago-based company that creates online communities. The website combines an online art community with a highly successful e-commerce business model. Threadless lets anyone create ideas for a t-shirt design and submit their artworks. The artwork is voted on and chosen by over 1 million registered users of the community. Each week, based on the average score using a five-point rating scale and community feedback, the highest-scoring designs or those that display a thought-provoking viewpoint are selected. Those designs are then printed on clothing and other products and sold worldwide through online stores. The contributing designers are paid up to $2,500 for a first run. Threadless keeps rights to the designs on clothing’s and designers keep the rights to their designs on other media. 

In 2000, co-founders Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart started Threadless in 2000 with $1,000 of their own money. It began as a t-shirt design competition on dreamless.org, which is now defunct. The founders built a website Threadless.com introducing a voting system using five-point rating scale. By 2002, the founders quit school and started their own web agency called skinny Corp where Threadless was built under. In 2000, Threadless shirts were printed every few months but in 2004 the company started printing new shirts every week. In 2008 Threadless became known as “The Most Innovative Small Company in America.”

In a 2006 Jeff Howe, a contributing editor at Wired Magazine who covers the media and entertainment industry coined the term “Crowdsourcing.” Crowdsourcing is a process where a task or a problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific body like paid employee. It refers to the way in which humans and computers work together to accomplish tasks or solve problems. It is a type of participative online activity in which a crowdsourcer proposes and broadcast problems to a group of unknown people (solvers) of varying knowledge in a form of an open call for solutions. Users, also known as the crowd, submit solutions. Crowdsourcing may produce solutions from various types of users—from amateurs or volunteers or experts or small businesses. The solutions are then owned by the crowdsourcer. Users are motivated to contribute to crowdsourcing tasks for social contact, financial gain or intellectual satisfaction.

Jeff Howe associated Threadless with crowdsourcing. Threadless encourages idea generation with an ongoing open call for design submissions. It also encourages collaborative production and funding of projects ranging from feature films to business launches to philanthropy to personal fund-raising. Threadless completely blurs the line of who is a producer and who is a consumer. The customers end up playing a critical role of its operations: idea generation, marketing, and sales forecasting.

 

 The Threadless model is simple yet revolutionary. It keeps expanding community-based design opportunities for other organizations. Threadless staffs organize online events to promote causes and raise profits for nonprofits and caused based organizations. They have raised money for earthquake victims in New Zealand and for those affected by the Japanese tsunami and earthquake as well as for the Alzheimer’s Association. The rapid and vibrant engagement of online users has propelled the Threadless community through phenomenal growth to become to a global intellectual economy.

Sources:

Threadless T-Shirts Main Website: http://www.threadless.com/

Alsever, Jennifer. “What is Crowdsourcing?” CBS News. 7 March 2007.  29 April 2012.< http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-51052961/what-is-crowdsourcing/>

Nickel, Jake. Threadless: Ten Years of T-shirts from the World's Most Inspiring Online Design Community. New York: Abrams Image, 2010.