Look out for the little guy
// July 31st, 2006 // 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.
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.
