Companies I admire #2: Threadless
Threadless.com is an American community centred T-shirt store that was started in January 2000 by two Chicago based illustrators, Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart. Threadless’ press pack mentions that “They came up with the idea after Jake Nickell won the NMUF London tee shirt competition. It felt good to win a tee shirt competition and we thought it’d be cool to extend that to the level that Threadless has become,”.
After winning this competition, Threadless was born, taking on a community feel where people submit t-shirt designs, with the Threadless community rate each design on a 1-5 scale and whether they’d buy it or not. The highest rated each week are then turned into limited edition T-shirts, which are available for 15 US Dollars a T-shirt, which are periodically reduced down to $10 for seasonal sales.
Just having the guts to take the plunge and set up such a radical idea as this gets my full kudos to the guys – I’ve more or less got my whole collection made up of Howies or Threadless Tees. Howies tees feel better, but Threadless’ are cheaper and have funnier designs, and more available.
They’re not setting out to be uber-ethical, or uber-hip. They’re just Threadless, and they’re great.
Some of the research of this entry came from an assignment I did as part of my course, available here. It is a 1.6 MB PDF file and got 70% (A first – just!)
