A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting with Jake Nickell of Threadless “on location” in Chicago. It was awesome to get a glance of the company backstage and to check-out some of the new stuff they’re working on.

To the few people who don’t know what “Threadless” is all about here’s a quick introduction:

Threadless is a business which to an extreme degree is based on user-driven innovation or “crowdsourcing” – as many call it today. They use these techniques to make and sell T-shirts. Anyone can submit a design, then users get to vote on their favorites. The T-shirts that get the most votes are produced and sold online. Four to six designs are chosen every week from 600+ submissions to be printed and sold from the site with the winning designers receiving $2,000 in cash and prizes.

They’re doing a great job: Came up with a great – yet fairly simple – idea (which many people do!) but more importantly they executed this idea with so much energy and so much skill (which very few people do!) that “idea” quickly grew from a very small to be a million $ business. Well done.

I hope to convince Jake to do some projects together … that would be fun.
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This guy Frank Piller dissected a New York Times article on Threadless and found out that:

2000: Year of founding Threadless.

125: Number of submissions received by Threadless each day.

“Millions”: Dollars earned by selling T-shirts” not by hiring star designers but by asking anybody to design them.

Hundreds of thousands: Number of user voting each day.

6: Number of new T-shirt offerings per week.

1,500: Typical size of a batch of each new design.

2,000: Dollars paid to winning designers.

“Almost everything”: Number of items that sell out.

1: Number of Threadless stores, the first opened in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago in July 2007.

2.6 or higher: Score of most winning designs (on the rating scale from 0 to 5).

2.0: Lowest rank of a winning design.

x*n/z: “The final decision about which T’s actually get made and sold has always involved a bit of nonpublic number crunching. For example, Threadless looks at how many 0s and 5s a design gets; designs that inspire passionate disagreement often get printed because they tend to sell”.

1: There is a surprising degree of consistency — maybe even similarity — in the designs. “It’s a barometer of what’s going on in art and design right now,” Threadless director Kalmikoff suggests.

17: Number of winning designs submitted by Glenn Jones, a New Zealand designer.