Threadless
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Type of site
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Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2000 |
| Headquarters | Chicago, United States |
| Key people | Jake Nickell (founder, CEO) Jacob DeHart (founder, CTO 2000-2007) Thomas Ryan (CEO, 2008-2012) Jeffrey Kalmikoff (CCO, 2003-2009) Harper Reed (Lead Engineer, 2005-2007; CTO, 2007-2009) |
| Industry | Retail |
| Products | Apparel/prints |
| Employees | 100 |
| Parent | SkinnyCorp LLC |
| Slogan(s) | Make Great Together |
| Website | www |
| Alexa rank | 15,267 |
Threadless (stylized as threadless) is an online community of artists and an e-commerce website based in Chicago, Illinois founded in 2000, by Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart.
Threadless designs are created by and chosen by an online community. Each week, about 1,000 designs are submitted online and are put to a public vote. After seven days the staff reviews the top-scoring designs. Based on the average score and community feedback, about 10 designs are selected each week, printed on clothing and other products, and sold worldwide through the online store and at their retail store in Chicago. Designers whose work is printed receive $0 cash, 20% royalties based on net profits paid on a monthly basis, and $250 in Threadless gift cards, which can be exchanged for $200 cash. Each time a design is reprinted, the respective artist receives $500 cash (reference missing).
Co-founders Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart started Threadless in 2000 with $1,000. Threadless began as a t-shirt design competition on the now defunct dreamless.org, a forum where users experimented with computers, code, and art. Nickell and DeHart invited users to post their designs on a dreamless thread (hence the name Threadless), and they would print the best designs on t-shirts.
Shortly after the first batch of shirts was printed, the founders built a website for Threadless and introduced a voting system where designs could be scored 1 to 5. By 2002, Jake Nickell had quit his full-time job, dropped out of art school, and started his own web agency called skinnyCorp, with Threadless continuing to build under the skinnyCorp umbrella. The company moved from his apartment to a 900-square-foot office.
A new batch of t-shirts was printed once the previous batch had sold out. In 2000, Threadless would print shirts every few months. By 2004, the company was printing new shirts every week. By 2004, Threadless was big enough that skinnyCorp did not need to continue outside client work. The company moved to a larger warehouse space. In 2004, profit was around $1.5 million, and in 2006 it jumped to $6.5 million.
In a 2006 Wired article, Jeff Howe coined the term crowdsourcing. Jeff Howe soon associated Threadless with crowdsourcing.
In 2008, Threadless was featured on the cover of Inc. as “The Most Innovative Small Company in America.” Though Nickell did not disclose revenues for the article, Inc. estimated $30 million sales and a 30% profit margin. "Threadless completely blurs that line of who is a producer and who is a consumer," said Karim Lakhani, a professor at Harvard Business School who was quoted in the article. "The customers end up playing a critical role across all its operations: idea generation, marketing, sales forecasting. All that has been distributed."
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Wikipedia