The original post from last year is here.

The main summary of the problems I saw were:

1. The Community is getting messy
2. Shipping times
3. Bad tee quality
4. Artists should be better compensated
5. Printing too many of each design
6. Too popular
7. Er, I cant think of anymore

I’d say they’ve had a pretty good stab at tackling at least 2 of those.

1. The community is getting messy
The blog forum got a nice facelift with an attempt to seperate out the topics, so you can see product, critique, and sub’d design. While this doesnt completely work, its a good start. The critique feature is really great. Threadless is a good place to learn design, as much as it is to appreciate it. Giving users the chance to co-create and collaborate was something that came out of the research from my dissertation. Now they can work on a design and get feedback before submitting it. Its also an example of delegating tasks back to users, so now rather than trawling through a weight of submission’s you have to reject, you let the community gently nudge the designer in the right direction. You get better submissions, and a clue what the community thinks of a design before it makes it into a contest. The artist gets support, a chance to learn new skills and less frustrated if users say his idea than threadless (I would suggest). This education will keep designers on the platform longer and brings back some of the more serious discussion.

Conclusion: Big improvement

2. Shipping times
Still to long. Made to order sites can produce from scratch and ship in 48hrs, so should threadless. Now its showing as 0-3days extra procesing time due to high demand? There’s a big difference between 0 & 3 days, and no mention of the standard time, all a bit vague. I’ve seen less complaining in the forums though, so things seem to be improving.

Conclusion: Slight improvement

3. Bad tee quality
I havent actually brought a Threadless shirt since they launched their own line, I have too many already. So I’ll open this one up? Are the new ones better? I’ve heard some positive and some negative things.

Conclusion: you tell me

4. Artists should be better compensated
My feelings on this havent changed. Re-payment on reprint is a must for me, its not necessary but in my eyes the right thing to do for the artists. As I said last time if something is popular enough to make it financially viable to reprint it, knowing its already sold out and the risk is 0.1% then why not share the love. Competitively it would do no harm at all.

Conclusion: Same

5. Printing too many of each design
Print less, of more was my main message last time. Thats not happened, but at least they are printing more which helps. Now that i’ve moved to germany I can’t really comment on this one, Leipzig isnt Cambridge or London so the only Threadless I see are at Spreadshirt HQ (oh and randomly a barmaid at a depeche mode night at the weekend).

Conclusion: Same

6. Too popular
My main gripe, somepeople might dis-agree with me that when something gets too popular you’re less likely to wear it, but for me its a big problem. The reason you go online and buy internationally is because you dont want to shop on your highstreet. Well threadless could become the h&m of the e-highstreet in the not too distant future. Two Boing Boing posts this week, a webby’s nomination (alongside cafepress). Should Threadless care? Probably not, its certainly wont hurt sales per se, but it will hurt sales to certain demographics eg elitist, snobby people like me.

My personal theory is that those demographics carry an under-appreciated amount of weight in the trends of all other consumers (something I talked about in my original post) lets call it reverse-tipping point effect – those consumers get you big by starting the party, those consumer’s tell you when you’ve jumped the shark by moving on.

Conclusion: Same

What else has been going on:

Kids platform? I’m lukewarm on this one, I know its aimed at parents but theres something about it that leaves a sour taste in my mouth. For one it opens the door to some horrific matching parents and child outfit synchorisation crimes, but also because I like the idea kids are left to get dirty, terrorise old people, put things up their nose and generally be totally oblivious to what they wear until they’re at least 15. Maybe i’m an old-fashioned idealist, or I need kids to get this one.

What does everyone else think about the ways things are developing over at Threadless?

My Disclaimer’s re-cap:

1) I love Theadless
I owe Threadless a lot, I’ve been collecting tshirts for years but it was my introduction to Threadless from a messageboard link a few years ago that kick started this blog, helped me get an excellent degree classification, my current job. They are like a website version of The Simpsons, absolutely everyone loves them and if you don’t you should rightly be outcast by society like some kind of social leper.

2) I work for a competitor in Spreadshirt
I can see why people would think I’m biased, I’d think that too. All I can say is I wear a Threadless tshirt at least two days a week into work and see at least 5 others during the working day, we are pro Threadless, this is a big marketplace!

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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.

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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…

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The new rules state that

“The participant may display or archive the design in a portfolio or personal collection, but may not sell or reproduce the design for commercial purposes for 90 days after the design has completed scoring.

In addition, during this period, the participant cannot submit the design to another company to be potentially produced.

Once this time frame has passed, the participant is free to use the design for commercial purposes, however the participant must email Threadless to notify where and when it will be produced so that it can be removed from the Threadless.com website.

Also, if the design is printed elsewhere, the participant cannot use the Threadless blogs to promote the product or another company.”

There has been a mini backlash at this, you can read some of it here

Personally I think this is an extremely reasonable submission policy and designed to help Threadless remain competitive, being fair to both the artist and Threadless. The 90 day window seems a little longer than necessary but will most likely only deter people who submit in multiple places.

Yabbos and Shirtstain have also taken some flack for selling ex-threadless submission. I’m not really sure why, Threadless have some great designs gathering dust so why not put them to use. Just because it might have made economic sense for Threadless to produce 5,000 tee’s (or however many they do make) doesnt mean that it won’t for make economic sense for somone like Go Ape! (who have also used ex-threadless designs) to do a run of 500 or whatever.
We benefit from greater choice and the artist from greater exposure and £. The obvious criticism of these businesses is that they piggy back off of Threadless and reduce some of originality or risk involved in selling these designs. I can see the point in that but really successful businesses will always attract micro businesses “exploiting” their model, its more a compliment than serious threat to Threadless. Yeah it removes some of the risk of production, but that has always been what Threadless was about. While they probably didnt plan on that benefitting their competitors I guess it was almost inevitable. If they really wanted to stop it happening (and it would definetely detract from their business model) they could never reveal the average score even after scoring is complete, but I don’t think theres too much here to worry about.

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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:

- Blog Forum – its way way more than a messageboard. These stats are from a questionnaire I posted on the Blog Forum in Oct, how many t-shirt sites could say that 51% of their customers (or a small sub-section in this case) check their site “several times a day”

Other Threadless Community Features:
- Tee-rrrific photo’s
- Birthday messages (its a little thing but makes a difference)
- Street Team (great for promoting loyalty)
- Interaction with their community of messageboards
- Obviously the design contest itself
- Promotion tools for designers and bloggers

Online communities have been found to be highly innovative and can be found for almost every product or service (Fuller & Hienerth 2004), with research suggesting that many innovations originate in the user rather than the manufacturer domain (Von Hippel 1988; Piller & Walcher 2005).

If you go and have a look at the Threadless Blog Forum you’ll see nearly a hundred posts a day (I know I’ve counted and categorised 450 posts here). Oddica I might visit occasionally, maybe when they e-mail an update or something and its filed away in my “good” t-shirt bookmark section. Even though the designs are incredibly good its difficult for it to stand out amongst the all the other sites also in that bookmark folder.

Threadless for its legions of fans (particularly those who use the blog forum) is way more than a cool site in a bookmark folder its 90% of their online experience, blogging, rating, designing, posting pictures its their google, myspace etc all in one. Its the first site they check when they go online and its comprises the majority of their online experience (stats from diso). Once your hooked these features make the site incredibly sticky and you’ll come back again and again, can other sites really say they promote that sort of stickyness and why don’t some even try. These results are from a questionnaire I posted on the Blog Forum and highlight this loyalty

Part 2 of this feature will look more at communities and in particular at design-your-own sites like Spreadshirt, it will be up in a few days…

Sources -

Fuller, J. & Hienerth, C. (2004) Engaging the creative consumer. European Business Forum (EBF); issue 19, autumn 2004.

Piller, F. Walcher, D. (2006): Toolkits for Idea Competitions: A Novel Method to Integrate Users in New Product Development, Journal of R&D Management.

Von Hippel, E. (1998) Economics of Product Development by Users: Impact of “Sticky” Local Information. Management Science, vol 44, n.5 (May) p. 629-644

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