Adam Fletchers – The Zig

7 reasons why Threadless don’t rule (as much as they used too) update

// April 19th, 2007 // Comments // Threadless, Virtual Community

So its been 5 months (time really flies huh?) since my first 7 reasons Threadless post which prompted a fair bit of discussion on the burdens of popularity. I thought now was as good a time as any to review whats happened since that post and revisit my original arguments. Below are the alexa and google trend data. I dont think these are worth anymore than one minute of your time, that’s my faith in their reliability but i’ll put them here and you can draw your own conclusions:

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Threadless Research now available

// December 19th, 2006 // Comments // Articles/Features, General, Mass Customisation, Threadless, Virtual Community

The Threadless guys kindly agreed for me to add my dissertation to HipHipUK entitled

“Do consumers want to design unique products on the internet?”
A study of the online Virtual Community of Threadless.com and their attitudes to Mass Customisation, Mass Production and Collaborative Design.

It will go up later today but the page is ready here http://www.hiphipuk.co.uk/research/

I surveyed over 200 hundred people from the Threadless Community and the result is 85 fun packed pages of research, pretty graphs, bad spelling and grammar all about Virtual Communities, Involvement vs Uniqueness, Manufacturing Approaches, Design Contests, oh and tshirts.

I didnt want it to sit gathering dust with the ideas going out of date, so hopefully somebody might find it useful.

I’ll also use some of the content on future posts here in the next few weeks/months.

The Future of the Design Contest

// August 18th, 2006 // Comments // Articles/Features, Spreadshirt, T-shirts, Threadless, Virtual Community

Whats the future of the design contest format? Its a crowded market place these days, one company that I think could make it interesting again is Spreadshirt.

The Draw from spreadshirt looks intruiging and hints at a wider push towards design contests in the future. This is also the first venture I’ve seen under both the spreadshirt and la fraise banners. I thought that spreadshirt might rebrand La Fraise but I think it’s a smart move that they haven’t, after all the have different target markets and La Fraise has a great rep in its market space. I think this design contest (and I dont know how its going to run so I could be way off the mark with this) could be an evolution in the format because of spreadshirts one-off production capabilities. The design contest is an attractive format because:

1. It attracts community by offering involvement and discussion (you know my thoughts on community, if not read the community is king series here)

2. It reduces the risk for the host company, the voting allows you to see the popularity of a product before you’ve gone to the trouble of printed a thousand examples of it that you now have to try and offload. Threadless from years of experience and sales data can probably forecast better than anyone the likely interest in a design and configure production to match. Its a much safer investment to spend thousands of $’s on a run of t-shirts if hundreds of people have said its great.

Spreadshirts model is different, they own now own not only the format in La Fraise but the production as well (in spreadshirt) providing them with profit from producing one-off t-shirts.

Wheres the part where this gets interesting? Now…

Spreadshirts design contests can follow a different format. Take Threadless’ for example – like a design that was submitted? It didnt win? Oh dear, better wait for it to come to Yabbos or something. Â

Spreadshirt on the other hand could build a store around every competition and although there are winning designs and the winner gets the £ and kudos why not offer every design for purchase? Write into the TOCs that every design submitted will be offered for sale (probably after the competition is closed) and that the creator will recieve x £’s per sale. The competition is still an interesting format, everyone that submits a design stand a chance to win but also make some £ in the process even if they dont win.

The only potential problem would be in deciding ownership of the rights to that design with it creator. The Threadless approach might work, by submitting a design you grant us the rights to sell it on La Fraise/Spreadshirt for 90days (with the creator receiving % of sale) after that period you have the right to request the removal of the design, at which time full copyright is returned to the creator.

Oh well I guess we’ll see soon enough…

Look out for the little guy

// July 31st, 2006 // Comments // Articles/Features, T-shirts, Threadless, Virtual Community

I’ve been contacted this week by both Yabbos and Shirtstain who are some of the first (I think GoApe had a couple as well) of stores to feature Threadless designs that didn’t win. The online t-shirt business has gone crazy in the past year and it was only a matter of time before Threadless’ submission rules changed to represent the newly competitive industry they operate in.

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Community is King

// July 7th, 2006 // Comments // Articles/Features, Threadless, Virtual Community

I’ve been thinking more about Oddica since I posted about them a few days ago. I’m a huge fan and I think that they have really shaken things up and raise the bar, certainly design wise for the market. One thing that bugs me about the site and there are many other t-shirt sites like this as well is the lack of community features. I think that to build a really good successful site you need to think about more than just the product.

Take Threadless for example, most people assume their success is largely because they were one the first out the blocks and pioneered the design contest approach. This neglects to mention just how intelligently they have developed a community of like minded individuals around their brand. Some ways they’ve done this are:

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