What is threadless.com?
Threadless is an online community-centered on-going t-shirt design competition. In 2000, Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart started the company with $1,000, after winning an Internet t-shirt design contest.
Its headquarters are in Chicago, Illinois. The 25,000-square-foot office is open to customers and some of them stop by every day to pick up shirts in person. They sometimes hang out in a space that resembles a huge college dorm room, where there are video game consoles, a giant television, beanbag chairs, action figures, a Ping-pong table, and a full-size Airstream trailer that the company uses as a studio in which to produce podcasts.
This video gives us some insight into their office and products:
June 30th 2008 Releases from Threadless.com on Vimeo.
In time, they developed three more websites:
1. Typetees - where members submit slogans 65 characters long.
2. Threadless Select features designs contributed from Threadless designers who have previously won the main competition four times or more.
3. Threadless Kids sells selected winning designs printed on kid-sized t-shirts and onesizes.
Threadless Offline
In August 2007, Threadless launched a retail store in Chicago. A variety of shirts from the website are available in the store and change every Friday. In the upstairs portion of the store is a gallery, where customers may sign up for design classes.
Threadless in figures (according to this article):
The user base grew tenfold, from 70,000 members at the end of 2004 to more than 700,000 today.
Sales in 2006 hit $18 million — with profits of roughly $6 million.
In 2007, growth continued at more than 200 percent, with similar margins.
Though Nickell refuses to disclose the exact revenue number — perhaps because he now counts Insight Venture Partners, a New York venture capital firm, as a minority shareholder — it seems fair to assume that Threadless sold more than $30 million in T-shirts in 2007.
Concepts
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CROWDSOURCING
A Threadless t-shirt or design is considered to be crowd sourced.
Via Wikipedia:
Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology or carry out a design task (also known as community-based design). The difference between crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to the public rather than another body.
The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of controlling the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals.
Rewards vary from case to case:
- financial compensation
- intellectual satisfaction (e.g. Wikipedia contributors)
- kudos (”fame” resulting from an act or achievement)
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USER INNOVATION
Threadless is driven by user innovation. Coined by Eric von Hippel of MIT, this term refers to innovation developed by consumers and users, rather than manufacturers. Von Hippel revealed that most products and services are actually developed by users, who then give ideas to manufacturers. This is because products are developed to meet the widest possible need; when individual users face problems that the majority of consumers do not, they have no choice but to develop their own modifications to existing products, or entirely new products, to solve their issues. Hoping to have the manufacturers actually produce that product, user innovators often share their ideas with them, in a process called free revealing.
Being part of a user innovation process involves the existence of a toolkit.
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TOOLKIT FOR USER INNOVATION
According to Von Hippel, a toolkit should contain:
- Learning by trial-and-error: users should go through these cycles in order to find their own mistakes and find efficient solutions.
- An appropriate solution space
- A user friendly toolkit
- Commonly used modules
- Result easily created by producer
During the Threadless user innovation process, each designer can submit his or her works whenever he or she wants to, but a duplicate of a submission with minor changes will be declined. They can first submit the design for a critique and then, after receiving feedback, they can submit it for approval.
The toolkit a member should download and use contains:
- a document with possible reasons for rejecting a submitted project: it needs more work, it uses too many colors, it contains a model or image used without permission, it is inappropriate (the minimum age of the members is 13 ), it contains only text, the image quality is poor, etc.;
- a guide to the new printing techniques;
- threadless blank photos
- tee templates in three formats: Flash, Photoshop and Illustrator (see below the .psd format)
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IS THREADLESS A LOVEMARK?
Henry Jenkins talks about lovemarks, which are what makes the difference between inspirational brands and brands that struggle.
If you are connected to a brand through a lovemark, it means:
- it is a bond you cannot live without
- the brand is not just like any other brand, that you can replace easily. You will suffer if it goes away.
- it is “loyalty beyond reason”
Editors at lovemarks.com have made a love-respect axis that explain lovemarks in relation to brands, products and fads. Here it is a reproduction:
I think people LOVE Threadless products. When they opened their first offline store in Chicago (and the only one so far), members of the community wrote to Jake Nickell that they were hoping he would never open another store, otherwise all people will have the same T-shirts.
Threadless has been nominated as a lovemark on lovemarks.com, under the comment:
Once you go Threadless, it’s over - you’re addicted.
Organization
Threadless is organised based on Philip Anderson’s article More is Different, mentioned in Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody”. More is different means that a community’s behavior and characteristics are not the sum of individual behaviors or characteristics.
Threadless doesn’t respect the traditional model of organisation, which is based solely on hierarchy and boss-subaltern relations. In this traditional organizational structure, there is a high demand of effort to maintain discipline and structure within the organization. Shirky reveals that new social tools are “lowering the costs of coordinating group actions”. With Threadless, new social tools are lowering the production costs.
Threadless makes a clear distinction between staff members and designers. Staff people have distinct attributions:
- approve the designs that will be shown on the website and scored;
- set the rules.
They don’t monitor the community. Each member is responsible for making the community happy and for reporting what is inappropriate.
The hierarchy is flexible, meaning that members’ roles interchange: they either score others’ designs and thus participate in making the final decision (whose design gets selected and printed, thus who gets financial reward), but, in the same time, the same members are being scored by the community. They write their own blog entries, upload photos and also comment on others’ entries.
The model of organizing Threadless highly relies on rules. First, you need to create an account and to provide accurate information to submit anything (designs, comments, photos, videos, etc.) Then, there are terms and rules concerning any user submissions, conduct, design and type tee slogan submissions in particular, conditions to participate.
In order to submit your work, you need to download the toolkit and follow the instructions. Otherwise, your design will never receive approval and will not appear online. The design should be 100% original (without any third-party trademarks, logo, etc.). Not even a modified design will be accepted.
If the design is accepted, the rules are stated very clearly: Threadless.com may use it in any manner, “including but not limited to reproducing the Design on the Items, selling Items bearing the Design, changing or reworking the Design by making color or size changes, making derivative works of the Design, using the Design on the Threadless.com website and on promotional material for Threadless.com, and registering the Design with the US Copyright Office in the name of SkinnyCorp LLC as the Claimant, and you as the Author.”
“If your Design is selected, you may not use the Design (or derivatives of the Design) or allow others to use the Design (or derivatives of the Design) on any Items, as described above. In addition, by submitting your Design, you may not reproduce, sell, or submit the Design to others for any commercial purpose for ninety (90) days after the date of submission while the Design is being evaluated by Threadless.com. Once the ninety (90) days have passed, if your Design is not chosen for print by Threadless.com, you are free to use the Design for any commercial or non-commercial purpose. However if your Design is used elsewhere, you must notify Threadless.com by email art@threadless.com about where and when the Design will be used, so that it can be removed from the Threadless.com website at that time” (source)
Participation
The process of participating in this community and competition consists of several steps:
- the designer registers as a member
- he or she downloads the submission kit that teaches him/her how to submit his/her design and provides templates
- the design receives approval
- the designer uploads his/her t-shirt designs to the website, where visitors and members of the community score them on a scale of 0 to 5.
On average, around 700 designs compete in any given week. Each week, the staff selects about six to ten designs. Each designer selected receives $2,000 in cash and $500 in Gift certificate, as well as an additional $500 for every reprint.
How can members participate? According to Shirky, they share, cooperate and make collective actions. Threadless reaches all levels of participation.
1. Sharing “creates the fewest demands on participants” (Shirky, p. 49).
Members share photos, articles, thoughts, work, creating thus communally available resources.
2. “Cooperation is harder than simply sharing, because it involves changing your behavior to syncronize with people who are changing their behavior to synchronize with you. Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants , cooperating creates group identity - you know who you are cooperating with. One simple form of cooperation, almost universal with social tools, is conversation.” (Shirky, p. 50)
Threadless members participate into forums and in the Alumni Club (under the condition their work got printed at least once).
Many of them are very active.
Possible reasons for a heavy participation:
- it is cool to get your T-shirt printed!
- social networking with people with whom they share interests
- financial rewards: Threadless points or cash ($2200 for a winning-design). Also, if members submit a photo of them wearing their Threadless tee, they receive $1.50 in Threadless store credit. They can only submit one photo per tee they own. They win 10 points if Threadless uses their photo on the product page ($15).
- they want to be active and highly connected into the community in order to gain cool points and be scored well when they submit designs
- show expertise, knowledge (thus power) and also look for expertise (in so-called affinity spaces, mentioned by Henry Jenkins)
According to Paul Gee in Jenkins (”Convergence Culture”, p. 177), affinity spaces offer opportunities and resources for learning, “because they are sustained by common endeavour that bridge across differences in age, class, race, gender and education level, because people can participate in various ways according to their skills and interests, because they depend on peer-to-peer teaching with each participant constantly motivated to acquire new knowledge or refine her existing skills.” With a deeper involvement into the community and with more in number and more refined design submissions, Threadless members improve their skills, learn more from critiques or other community members’ works. They probably engage more they would do in a graphic design course. Threadless allows its members to feel like experts while they are tapping the expertise of others.
Participation is encouraged through:
- a public profile that displays the number of submissions and the average score they received. Users with many submissions and/or high scores have more credibility than ones with just a couple of submissions and/or low scores. Please see the examples below:
- forum categories and filters make the navigation through content easier and more efficient.
The third level of participation theorized by Shirky is collective action, obviously the most complex one. The commercial purpose of this community-centered apparel is to sell the products. In this case, the collective action leads to selecting the products that will sell. All community members vote to select the winning projects. Thus, the cohesion of the group becomes vital for its success. If members vote one product, it means they like it and they are interested in buying it. Practically, community members tell Threadless staff precisely which shirts to make and every product eventually sells out. And from this statement there is another idea deriving:
THE CUSTOMER IS THE COMPANY AND VICE VERSA
“Threadless completely blurs that line of who is a producer and who is a consumer,” says Karim Lakhani, a professor at the Harvard Business School in an article published on inc.com. “The customers end up playing a critical role across all its operations: idea generation, marketing, sales forecasting. All that has been distributed.”
This idea goes against a basic principle that has been taught in business schools since the invention of mass production: Employees create products and customers buy them.
In this context, Threadless also resembles the Web 2.0 sites that Shirky talks about as media outlets (e.g. YouTube). Threadless is not a media company: it designs, manufactures, and sells real products. It is an outlet in which artists display their art. But the process is the same. Anyone with Illustrator skills and ideas can get his or her idea printed on a T-shirt and be rewarded financially. Just as anyone with a camera and a good idea can win a YouTube contest.
“They’re the beginning of a new wave,” says von Hippel, the author of Democratizing Innovation, in the same article that was cited above. “Von Hippel envisions a future in which most companies essentially abandon market research and product design and instead rely on communities of users to figure out which products to sell”.
“Participation on Threadless is not just about voting for designs you really want to buy,” says Frank Piller, a management professor at Germany’s Aachen University and a researcher at MIT, cited in the article. “It’s an exploration of new designs, and it’s fun.” For a 2006 paper he published in the Sloan Management Review, Piller surveyed Threadless customers and found that only 5 percent were buying shirts without first voting on designs. “Almost no one was simply consuming,” he says. “They were all participating.”
Integration
Threadless integrates other technologies and applications, such as:
Threadless also broadcasts on Tee-V channel, not on a regular basis: there could be two clips in a single day or two in a week. They broadcast Spoiler alerts, meaning hints for the new tees and reprints rolling at the beginning of the week. In this case, spoiling is done by the coordinators of the community and attracts comments in which members name their guesses.
Threadless Spoiler Alert - 11/10/08 from Threadless.com on Vimeo.
Conclusion
The Threadless brand is not the shirts but the community experience.
“To say it’s just a T-shirt company is absurd. I look at it as a community company
that happens to use T-shirts as a canvas.”
Jeff Lieberman (managing director of Insight Venture Partners)
It is successful, because it is what its customers want it to be. Because it centers on trustworthy. Threadless succeeds by asking of its customers to design the products, to serve as the sales force and to become the employees.
Threadless is an example of a site “held together through the mutual production and exchange of knowledge.” (Jenkins, p. 27)