On the list of companies that I admire and wish I had started, Threadless is pretty high up there.
Now it’s time for the awkward woodsy t-shirt shots! Fun! Woodsy!
I wear a lot of shirts by Threadless. Threadless was born of a couple guys who played a lot of photoshop ping-pong and started putting their images on t-shirts, and holding contests for t-shirt designs. Twelve years later, anyone can submit a design and anyone can sign up to rate shirts.Their system makes it more of a “Threadless club” than just a “Company that sells shirts.” Highly rated designs are printed onto shirts, and everyone buys them, and they come with free stickers.
This is crowdsourcing. Like opensourcing, but different.
One problem, I think, is that because Threadless is crowdsourced, and because they only pay for the designs that win, it’s not going to attract a lot of professional designers. I see Threadless as something for amateur designers to do, and something that professional designers could do. For fun. Threadless pays, but they only pay for the designs that are printed. That’s a little bit like a company saying “We want a website, so how about you design a website for us, and then we might pay you.” For a lot of companies, this mentality leads to inferior work because the designers don’t have the chance to find what the company needs before diving in. The same isn’t quite true for t-shirts, because Threadless is always looking for a t-shirt design that people will like, it’s not as complex as a website. For the designers, contests usually cheapen the work that they do. Contests draw a lot of designers who are willing to work for free, and they let companies assume that this kind of design work should be free; or at least very cheap.
Threadless can do this because it feels honest and fun. If Hot Topic tried to do this it would come off as fake and corporate and plastic.
If there’s anything fantastic that you know about in art and/or design, email me about it, and you’ll probably see it on the blog soon.