Design to a Tee
By Simon Fuller. US-based online design community Threadless has been hailed as an example of just how crowdsourcing can work. So, what’s it all about? Tee shirts, of course.
The idea is that Threadless community of artists dreams up some nifty designs, which are then put to the public vote via the site – the outfit has some one million followers who get to decide just what gets printed. If you’re an artist and your design makes the grade, you get a financial reward – a cool $2,000 – while Threadless goes ahead and runs off the design in Tee form. Artists can earn more dough if their design gets reprinted at a later date.
There’s no doubt that this open crowdsourcing call has led to some inspired designs. Check out Marion Cromb’s ‘undead’ take on an iconic Audrey Hepburn image or Alice X. Zhang and Peter Kramar’s ‘X-Menagerie’, a cheeky animal-based homage to one of the comic book world’s most popular titles.
“Threadless was first launched in November of 2000 as a thread on an art forum called Dreamless, one hour after the concept was thought up,” explains Cam Balzer, vp of marketing at Threadless. “The thread was an open call for Tee shirt designs. The best ones would be printed and sold from Threadless.com and the artist would get a couple of free Tees with their designs. The idea came up shortly after our founder, Jake Nickell, won a Tee shirt competition for an event called New Media Underground Festival, which took place in London. Jake thought it would be cool to have an ongoing contest where people could always be submitting Tee shirt art, and he and his partner would print the best stuff. So he then immediately started the thread asking for the first round of designs.
“From there, the community has helped drive the growth. Threadless treats the community as integral to our creative direction and even business decisions. The key to our success is our community.”
Threadless has since expanded into social media spaces, with the launch of Twitter Tees, in which the community voted on you guessed it – tweets they’d like to see make the transition from feed to apparel. So Threadless ended up printing posts including ‘140 is the new 420’ from @mutgoff and ‘In space no one can hear you Tweet’ by @LouisTrapani, with the tweeters responsible receiving a few hundred dollars as a reward.
“The Twitter series started with personal relationships between the entrepreneurial folks at Threadless and Twitter,” says Balzer. “Both liked each others’ models and businesses. In conversation, we hit on the idea of crowdsourcing Tee shirt slogans via Twitter, with its great combination of the brevity of tweets and their frequent aphoristic quality.”
Threadless isn’t planning to stop at Twitter, either.
“We are continually exploring new vehicles for growing our community of artists and giving people new vehicles for sharing with friends,” says Balzer. “Some social media vehicles we’re into right now – the Facebook ‘Like’ button has tremendous potential, and we’re using [location-based social networking service] Gowalla for our tenth anniversary tour and loving it.”
