Community is King
// July 7th, 2006 // 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:
- 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”
| How many times a week do you visit the Threadless.com website? | ||
| Less than once a week | 2 | 1.02% |
| Once or twice a week | 15 | 7.65% |
| Every other day | 22 | 11.22% |
| Every day | 57 | 29.08% |
| Several times a day | 100 | 51.02% |
| Total | 196 |
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
| Since your first purchase from Threadless.com, what percentage of ALL your t-shirt purchases(including purchases from both online retailers and traditional offline stores) have come from Threadless.com. |
|
| 0-60% were left out but total the missing 38.21% |
| 70% | 18 | 10.11% |
| 80% | 30 | 16.85% |
| 90% | 19 | 10.67% |
| 100% | 38 | 21.35% |
| Not sure | 5 | 2.81% |
| Total | 178 | 100% |
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
